


How He Laughs

by midrashic



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dubious Consent, Getting Together, Implied/Referenced Torture, Kidnapping, M/M, Movie: SPECTRE (2015), Pining, SPECTRE Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-11
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-09-13 05:29:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16886514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midrashic/pseuds/midrashic
Summary: "He's sitting at your desk, he's kissing your lover, he's eating supper with your family!"Bond should've taken Mr. White's words more seriously.





	1. always second-guessing love

**Author's Note:**

> In this fic, _SPECTRE_ takes place about a year after _Skyfall_. Our story picks up about eight months after _Skyfall_. Rated T for canon-typical violence and mentions of sex.
> 
> Warnings: dubious consent (scroll to end notes for details), canon-compliant sexism (dismissive references to James's past sexual partners, a man making sexual advances to a woman who has expressed disinterest to him in the past but is receptive at the moment), past childhood abuse by a sibling, depictions of torture, non-consensual touching.
> 
> Beta'd by the marvelous Bella. This is my holiday gift to the 00Q fandom; thanks for everything wonderful you gave me during a pretty terrible year.

– ♠ – ♠ – ♠ –

Q, beautiful and remote, was utterly unchanged from the conversation they’d had last week. He set out Bond’s gun and radio and a very nice set of sunglasses with which he could take photographs and send the information back to Q-branch with just a blink of his eyes on the sleek metal table that stood like a barrier between them. Bond surveyed him. He looked good: well-rested and sleek, eyes sharp on Bond’s wandering hands and penchant for nicking knick-knacks off of Q’s desk in the hopes that they might explode.

There was a love bite at the corner of his jaw. Bond was stalwartly trying not to look at it.

“Eve’ll be down in just a mo’ with your passport and documentation,” Q said crisply, arranging his glasses to sit more securely on his nose. “Remember, this mission is strictly reconnaissance. If I were at all certain you could follow orders to keep this quiet, I wouldn’t even be giving you the gun.”

“You wound me, Q,” Bond murmured.

“I’ll do a lot more than that if you come home without the sunglasses,” Q said blithely. “I dare to say that we’ve spent more on that pair of specs right there than on you.” He smiled at Bond, a lovely tuck in the curl of his mouth, and Bond cursed his traitorous—what? Not heart, certainly, he had it on good authority he didn’t have one of those anymore. Ego, perhaps. He cursed his traitorous ego that something about Q, who had shut down his advances so totally and so ruthlessly, still made his head spin and his gut twist.

“And yet you can’t find anything more fashionable for your own face than _those_.”

“I have it on good authority that these flatter my face,” Q said primly.

“Not _very_ good authority,” Bond mused, battling back the sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. Was he the only one who felt this a farce of their usual banter, a pale imitation of something that had once sparked so brightly in his life? It wasn’t Q. Q was the same as ever, sharp and sweet in equal measure. It was he who’d changed since his and Q’s disastrous date. Q’s sweet, wine-dark laugh still rang in his ears.

He heard the clacking of Eve’s heels and turned his head just in time to catch her stalk down into the temporary warehouse in which Q-branch fitted out agents from the armoury before dropping them off in the middle of whatever red-blooded military conflict of the week required their presence. Her bright green dress threw slants of colour between the high shelves on which were packed decades’ worth of squeezing weapons into ordinary objects. She was holding a plain manila folder. “Bond,” she said pleasantly.

“Moneypenny.” Surely it was annoying for her to spend most of her time running around the various buildings MI6 had co-opted when they'd crawled out of Churchill’s bunkers to find a changed world, but it wasn’t his place to ask. “I’m told you have something for me.”

“Yes, so be a good boy and don’t lose them like you did in Tbilisi. It’s such a pain to have the British Embassy generate replacements when you’re wanted for arson and terrorism in six provinces.”

Ah. “Did Q here tell you about that?”

“We gossip,” Eve said brightly, at the moment Q choked and said, “Well, one does have to blow off steam somehow.”

Bond had more dignity than to tell Q he could be blowing off steam with him. He tipped his head desultorily towards both Q and Moneypenny, gathered the various accoutrements of a mission to him, and watched with (hungry, he admitted) eyes as Moneypenny pecked at Q for not wearing his wrist brace _again_ while typing. He tried to store up good memories of the mundane, the utterly unextraordinary, to carry him through the bad times, the lean times. The times spent crouching in a field in the Ukraine for hours if not days on end, sniper rifle rubbing a sore against his shoulder. The times spent wading ankle-deep through muck and mud, a language he didn’t speak loud and cacophonous in his ears, and home feeling so very far away.

The last year or so—since his return, really—he’d been spending more and more of these moments gathering up and bottling the atmosphere of Q-branch, its rushing techs and clacking keys and, ever a pool of calm in a storm of boffins, its lovely department head. It felt strange to be back after days of studiously avoiding anything Q-related, lest his heart go into contortions. The criminal underworld had been obligingly quiet, letting him lick his wounds in peace. Still, a new mission came along eventually, as one always did and always would. And he was back in Q-branch, trying to appear unaffected and _not think_ about the bruise someone else had sucked into the hollow of skin just under Q’s ear.

He memorised the curve of Q’s mouth as he hid a smile at Moneypenny’s latest story of M’s Whitehall escapades and ducked out without saying goodbye. He’d never made a habit of it when he and Q were merely flirting at each other, he certainly wasn’t going to become sentimental now that he’d been summarily rejected.

It had been ten days. Why was he not _over_ him?

It was a long, lonely flight to Beijing.

– ♠ –

He’d thought—he hadn’t known what he’d thought. That Q might pass him off to another handler, for all that he liked to oversee the double-oh missions himself. He certainly hadn’t expected Q in his ear the moment he landed, just as if nothing had changed, chatting about the weather and the latest _Antiques Roadshow_. Bond sat in a café idly scrolling BBC News to throw off anyone who might be tracking his electronic activity while he took pictures of everyone who came in and out of the café’s suspiciously locked side door with Q’s marvellous sunglasses and Q ran their faces through his enhanced facial recognition software.

“Oh, hello,” Q drawled as a man with a particularly nasty scar across his right eyebrow darted out of the café and into the crowd. “Robert Larousse. Even small arms dealers get peckish, I suppose.”

“Want me to follow him?” Bond said under his breath.

“No, no, much better to identify the rest of the network now. Though I suppose you’ll probably end up sleeping with his mistress and blowing up three of his shipments before this mission’s done,” Q sighed.

“You flatter my destructive powers.”

“True. You haven’t blown anything up for almost a month. But that just means you’re overdue.”

Bond blinked twice to take another photo of a young woman entering through the side door, hair swept back and plain apron suggesting that she was here on legitimate business. “Remind me again why a double-oh was needed for this mission?”

“Didn’t you know? M wants you to relax.”

“What?” Bond said. This was the first he’d heard of any ulterior motive to this mission. He gripped his tablet, a cheap Samsung that Q-branch had given out more as a prop than as an actual tool.

“…Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you that. Well. Anyway. If you don’t take the time off you’re due, he’ll find a way to force it on you. He certainly did me,” Q said ruefully.

“You? On vacation? Never.”

“He sent me to the Bahamas with 005 to hack a tax evader’s computer,” Q grumbled.

Bond stuffed a taro ball in his mouth to stifle his first response, which was to laugh long and loudly. The image of Q perched on a beach in his customary cardigan or frumpy suit trying frustratedly to keep sand out of his beloved laptop keys was too precious for words. “I did wonder when you came back with that tan and an expression like a cat had shat on your shoe,” he said once he’d swallowed mirth and taro alike.

“Oi, my cats are very well-behaved, thank you. Dong Hua, a known associate of the 14K Triad.” He pronounced the man’s name in clear, precise tones that gave Bond no doubt he’d gotten the inflections right and could probably pull up the correct characters on demand. “A fixer of sorts. Interesting that he’d turn up here. Anyway, you’ll probably be seeing a string of busywork missions for a while. Best to just power through it until a mission comes up we can’t assign anyone else to. Or actually take your vacation days.”

“Don’t be absurd. It doesn’t suit you.”

“Me, absurd? You’re the one ten feet away from a woman named _Kiki Ambrosia._ Mistress of a high-powered gang leader, by the way.” 

Bond hid a smile in his teacup. The conversation they’d had months ago about the more ridiculous monikers of some of the women he’d come across still burned warmly and brightly in his heart, traitorous thing. “And to think, I haven’t even told you about Bunny Wands yet.”

“ _No.”_ Q sounded like he was choking on his own laughter. “You’re having me on.”

“I’m not. Hand on heart.”

“I don’t believe you. Your super spy deception skills won’t work on me.” A pause as Bond sent over another picture. When Q spoke again, his voice was cool and focused. “The man who just went into the café—did you see him?”

“Yes.” Bond didn’t have to say anything else. Q would know that if Bond said he’d seen someone, he meant he could give an accurate and exacting description of the man’s features and clothing on command.

“He’s Jeong Dae-Jung. He’s a North Korean operative; he’s been linked to five separate attacks or attempted attacks on Japanese and South Korean soil in the last fifteen years. He’s not rarely seen outside the motherland, and for good reason. If he’s in China, something is about to happen. Something big.”

“So follow him?”

“Follow him.”

Fourteen hours later, Bond was crawling through an air duct of a warehouse on the outskirts of Tianjin that was apparently being used as a server farm and mission control for North Korean operatives and which the Chinese government had apparently chosen as the ideal spot to hand over a massive shipment of weapons to the North Koreans. He had an unexpected ally—a local official in charge of staffing who often left the compound lightly defended and seemed to be sleeping with the North Koreans’ Control, which explained why he hadn’t been killed for his incompetence long ago.

“It’s love,” Q said.

Bond scoffed. “It’s idiocy.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t believe in love, Bond,” Q said teasingly. Bond paused halfway through squeezing himself past a particularly sharp turn. This wasn’t a topic that had come up during their disastrous date; he listened carefully for any hint of wistfulness or longing on Q’s part, but could only detect the same light camaraderie they’d always shared.

“I believe in love,” he said finally. “I just don’t believe in absolute trust, unlike a certain North Korean commander who’s left his base open to infiltration by British assassins.”

“Oh, Bond,” Q sighed. “What do you think love is? Drop down here, and I’ll show you how to hack the cooling systems to blow up their servers.”

Fuck. Even without trying, Q knew the way to his heart.

Bond exfiltrated with little fuss; only lightly bandaged, he walked on a plane in Beijing and walked off it in London. The mission had gone well, but he felt inexplicably worn from having Q’s voice in his ear the whole time, save for a few hours when he’d had to go rescue 002 from his own incompetence. His feet touched British soil and instinctively began to make their way to Q-branch’s draughty little warehouse, forgetting all the reasons why it wasn’t a good idea, everything except the smell of Q’s hair and the curve of his jaw. He’d thought he could do this. Work with Q, flirt with Q, never come close to touching or having him. It was harder than he’d thought.

Maybe some time off would do him some good after all. Some time away from Q, to clear his head. To fuck a few floppy-haired sprites and get this awful craving out of his system. And… as much as he scrupulously avoided the politics of his job, he’d texted 004 and 006 and discovered that he wasn’t alone in being sent far afield on whatever excuse M could dredge up. Something was happening in the corridors of power, and the more he could steer clear of it, the better. He rerouted to Whitehall; if Mallory was so keen that he take his vacation days, he might as well get the news firsthand.

Besides, there was someone he’d been putting off killing for a while.

– ♠ –

Tracking Marco Sciarra went slowly without the backing from Q-branch he was used to receiving. Independence was well enough, but in all his most important missions in the past, whenever an investigation had stalled out, the analysts and handlers had been there, offering a new lead, however slim. The first thing he did when his sabbatical was approved was reach out to his most reliable contacts, and when that failed, his less-reliable contacts. Still, it was months before he found himself in Santiago, chasing rumours of a man who seemed to have his finger in every pie, a plot in every capital city.

After Brazil, Panama City. He followed Sciarra to El Paso, Havana, always a frustrating two days behind, thinking in spite of himself, in spite of the way he had locked down everything weak and soft about himself to become 007, ruthless hunting dog on Her Majesty’s leash, that Q would’ve taken a fraction of the time to find him. In Havana, he heard whispers that Sciarra was meeting several associates in the heart of Mexico City. So, onwards. He’d never been there for the Day of the Dead parade before.

– ♠ –

Mexico City went… poorly.

– ♠ –

The evening after he was suspended, Moneypenny came to his flat in Notting Hill carrying the burnt-out remains of his old life, before he'd became a number in a classified file.

“All right, out with it,” she said bossily once she was fully through the door. She didn’t toss the small box of effects onto his barely-used sofa, one of four pieces of furniture in the living area of his flat, but set it down gently on the table. He could’ve told her that she didn’t have to be gentle with it, just as she didn’t have to be gentle with him. But it was… nice. Sweet.

“Out with what?” He uncorked a bottle of fine bourbon—Moneypenny’s preferred poison, when she was actually drinking and not just peacocking at the bar with Q and some godawful fruit concoction in hand—and poured it out for her. He saw her wavering, but finally she kicked her heels off and settled back into his couch, making little noises of surprised comfort. Bond smiled smugly. He’d seen the way she’d eyed the bare walls and unpacked boxes, but little did she know that when he did bother to add something to a place, it was invariably of high quality and excellent use.

“Whatever you were doing in Mexico City that caused you to blow up two buildings.”

“First of all: only one of the buildings blew up. It just collapsed on the other one.”

“Oh, forgive me,” Eve snorted, and took a sip of her bourbon. She made another annoyed, pleased sound.

“Second of all, maybe that was my goal from the start. Test M’s mettle a bit. Take his blood pressure.”

Moneypenny put down her glass with a forceful clink and fixed him with a sharp, assessing stare, an agent’s stare. Eight months ago, when the new M had taken office and Moneypenny had officially put any hope of returning to the field behind her, the halls of MI6 had been awash with chatter about demotions and punishments. By the times Bond had left on holiday, she’d been greeted instead with respectful nods and blatant groveling, as much for what she’d been able to accomplish as for the new rumours circulating, about whose shoes she was meant to fill. “Those tricks might work on your marks, or even M,” she said. “But they won’t work on me.”

Bond studied her. No, they wouldn’t. Shame about having friends; your ability to lie convincingly to them went out the window.

“I’m sure you have your own theories.” He settled back in his armchair. “Go on, I’m dying of curiosity.”

“Six thinks you’ve lost it, that you’ll be benched within the year. M thinks you’re bored and dangerous.”

“And what do you think?” He leaned forward, let his voice go smooth and soft as honey.

“I think,” Moneypenny said, unfazed, “that you never do anything without a reason. Something you won’t tell anyone. Because you don’t trust anyone.”

Bond played her the tape. She swore when it was over.

“How did she—no, I don’t want to know. She always had her secrets.”

“Understatement,” Bond murmured. “Moneypenny, listen—I need a favour.”

She protested. Of course she did—he was, in effect, asking her to use her position to pass information to a man who would essentially be operating as a rogue agent if he attempted to pursue this any further. The “I was taking some overdue holiday” excuse wouldn’t work twice. But she was a spy, too, and as with all spies, her curiosity was her weakness. 

Bond tried not to think very hard about why he had so fully and intensely thrown himself into fulfilling the late M’s last request. It had even, like all the very best—or worst—missions, succeeded in pushing all thoughts of his personal problems out of his head, at least temporarily. 

“Can I trust you?” he purred, when he was done.

“Always, James,” Moneypenny said softly, more earnest than he had expected.

He smiled at her, a swell of affection rising up in his chest. “Why do you think we never tried it?” he asked. “You and me.” No doubt it would’ve been easier than… whatever his heart had decided about Q.

“Is this you coming on to me?” she smirked. He leered at her for effect. She laughed. “We’d never work. You’d try to protect me, but you can’t do anything I can’t already do myself, and that would drive you mad.”

“You put up with all my… eccentricities.”

“Well, I’m your friend, James,” she said reasonably. “Prospective life partners make no such promise.”

Love is demanding the best of each other, Vesper had said once. He'd believed her. It had seemed so true when she had said it, so like what he had felt in his bones around her, his desire to be enough _for her_. It had probably been yet another lie, but he thought of being better than himself and ached. Bond drank too deeply and said instead of answering, "Another?"

They drank together exchanging companionable small talk for just over an hour. As he helped her back into her coat, she said, too lightly, like she had been saving the bad news for the end of the visit, “Try not to be busy two days from now. I have a date.”

“Oh?”

“Q’s introducing Tanner and me to his new boyfriend,” she said, watching him closely.

Bond felt memory hit him like a building crashing down on his head—

He’d corralled Q from his office just after seven and they’d walked to an upscale curry house that claimed, along with about a hundred other places, to be the oldest Indian restaurant in London. Q had been bright and animated, half complaining about whatever secret government rumblings were whitening M’s hair and causing tension among the ranks of Q-branch, half teasing James about what he’d been doing to keep busy when he was off-duty. “The theatre,” he’d said. “Or, no, the opera.”

“You’re picturing me in a pair of opera glasses now, aren’t you,” and Q’s laughter had rung out into the dusk like the peal of a bell.

“They’re very cute opera glasses. You’ve got a little chain for them, like a pince-nez, and I’ve modified them with a telephoto zoom.”

“Oh, that’s all right then,” he’d grumbled.

“The best bootlegging technology in the world,” Q had said merrily. 

“And what do you do when you’re not aiding and abetting me? Let me guess. One of those computer games, with the dragons and the orcs.”

“Oh, well done, you know what an orc is. Maybe I would if you ever stopped getting into trouble and gave me a night off every once in a while.”

“We’re off now,” he’d said lowly.

Q smiled slowly. “So we are.” The London night had misted around them. James had slipped his hand into Q’s and felt him squeeze back, a flicker of warmth he had grown unaccustomed to.

Here, now, Bond said, “Goodnight, Miss Moneypenny,” and walked her down to the street, like a gentleman. If he went back up to his lonely flat and spent the rest of the evening staring into the night of a city that had seemed much less lonely only months before, wishing like hell Moneypenny had never said anything to knock him out of the blissful blankness of a mission-high, feeling the filaments of memory twine around him and bind him tight to the past—well. No one was there to see him, anyway.

– ♠ –

Unlike M, Q wasn’t angry. He was something much worse.

He smiled and greeted Bond like usual, reprovingly nudging away whatever had caught Bond’s fancy in the lab this time, and the only hint Bond received that he might be anything less than pleased to see him was the way he said, “You may feel a small…” and paused tellingly before continuing, “ _prick_ ,” as he injected Bond’s shiny new tracker into his bloodstream. His latex-covered hand was cool on Bond’s arm. Q’s eyes sparkled with malice and glee, which made him look even more damnably attractive. All Bond could say for it was that it hurt less than torture.

Afterwards, Q had seemed apologetic, at least, which had mollified Bond briefly. “The nanobots will harmlessly degrade in your system over the next three months,” he said. “Hopefully that’ll be enough time for you to get back on M’s good side so he can finally get off _my_ back.”

Bond softened his stiff, exaggeratedly polite smile into something more genuine. “Does this mean you’ll be looking over my shoulder like my better angel?”

“Hardly,” Q sniffed. “If only because I know for a fact that the beings on your shoulders are both devils.”

All in all, Bond thought, it could have been worse. Then Q decided to take time out of his (very busy, as he admonished Bond whenever he stopped for a chat and perhaps a prod at the new explosives) day to show off an _absolutely gorgeous_ car specifically to tell him that it was no longer his to drive, to test, to push to her limits. Oh, Bond thought, Q was furious after all. It was just that, unlike M, he knew exactly how to hit Bond where it hurt, entirely independent of whatever Bond may or may not have felt towards him.

Face utterly tranquil, Q handed him a watch. “You can have this, though.”

Bond took it. It was at least a nice watch, an Omega Seamaster, rotating bezel, elegant band. “Does it _do_ anything?” he said dryly. 

“It tells the time,” Q said cheerfully. God, this man. Mostly he wanted to kiss him. Very rarely he wanted to kill him. He wasn’t quite sure which it was today.

“Wonderful,” Bond grumbled instead. Q swept off towards his workstation. Bond wasn’t sure he liked the new Q-branch headquarters he’d apparently been driven to by the massive changes in government that had taken place while he’d been on sabbatical. Better than the tunnels, worse than the warehouse, just as devoid of sunlight as the lairs before. He cast a glance over his shoulder; Tanner, his designated babysitter for the day, was crowding around a modified motorcycle with a pair of technicians. Now or never.

“Q,” he said, “I need a favour.”

Q closed his eyes, like he already knew he would regret asking. “Like what, 007?”

Bond smiled his most seductive smile. “I still have a few days of holiday left I’d like to take…”

Q choked on his laughter. “You’re joking, aren’t you? You’re lucky M hasn’t had you shot and dumped in the Thames.”

All right, so that wouldn’t work. Quick as anything, he let the seduction slide off his face and tried something he hadn’t in a very long time: sincerity. “Q, there’s… something I have to do. And I can’t do it in London.”

“You’re grounded, Bond,” Q said wearily.

“I know. But I…” To his dull surprise he felt something no one else but Q had managed for a very long time—stripped bare, offering his throat to be torn out. Cracked open and displaying whatever rot or soul was inside of him to the world. “I can’t tell you why. But I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t need it.”

“If I get fired, who will take care of the cats?” Q sniped.

“Trust me,” he whispered. Tanner was turning. Q didn’t look at him. Bond felt a dull sinking in his stomach. He hadn’t been aware that he still knew how to feel disappointment.

“Okay,” Q said.

Bond straightened, surprised but willing to take it in his stride like any good agent. He should have left now. He’d gotten what he’d wanted, there was no reason to stay. But he found himself lingering, tracing the line of Q’s nose, the mole on his throat, the way Q could aim a penetrating gaze at him without looking his way at all. “Thank you, Q,” he said, finally, and left to go prepare.

He’d keep him out of it. He had Moneypenny, he wouldn’t embroil Q in this mess any further than concealing him from M’s prying eyes for a few days. Q deserved that.

Bond took the boat by himself back across the river, feeling, in spite of his success, a bit like the old Vauxhall Cross building, or the wreck of DB5 propped up on breeze blocks in Q’s workshops: beaten, rusted, and far out of his depth.

– ♠ –

It was almost enough to make Bond feel bad about stealing the Aston.

Almost.

– ♠ –

At the funeral there was a minister, possibly three dozen criminals, and a woman with the shadow of death hanging about her standing in the front row.

Lucia Sciarra was beautiful, sophisticated, and terrified. She was haunted by men with guns, men who eyed her from a respectful distance at the funeral but never let her out of her sight lest she try to escape her fate, the fate of every woman who bought a life of luxury and power with the eventual payment of their lives. He followed her. He killed her killers. He kissed her.

Q had said, the damp clinging to his clothes as they stood on the street after dinner months before—

“I like you, James.” (A smile. Dimples at the corner of his mouth.) “I _really_ like you. But…”

James had ghosted close enough for a breath to brush against Q’s lips. “But…?”

“But I want something from you you’re not prepared to give,” Q had said softly, as though he’d been whispering bedroom secrets instead.

“Oh, I think you’ll find I’m prepared to give quite a lot.”

Another smile, wryer this time. “I have no doubt. But this is something different.”

Sensing a difficult conversation, James had pulled back. For the first time, the coolness of the night seemed to sink through his coat and into his bones. “What?”

“Fidelity.”

Cold shutters closed over his heart. He’d thought— “The missions—”

“Oh, I don’t care about the sex. I’d like to think we’re all civilised here. I’m talking about your heart, James,” he’d said, as if that had made any sense at all. “The women—”

“They don’t mean anything,” James had said, quick, curt.

“That’s something I’ve discovered about you,” Q had said thoughtfully, like James was a particularly tricky puzzle or experiment. “You lie. About everything important. They _do_ mean something to you, James. Not the marks, not the ones you use for access or intel, but every now and then there’s a woman _you_ like, really like, and when you come home a piece of your heart will be missing because you’ll have given it to her. I can’t live like that. I want all of you, or none of you. So I’ll take none of you.” He looked and must have seen something on James’s face, because Q had softened then as he’d said, most devastatingly of all, “What did you want from me, James? A quick fuck? A few months’ fling?” James had said nothing, because now that Q had asked he wasn’t sure what he’d wanted when he’d asked Q to dinner, but he knew it wasn’t that. “You knew what I’d ask for. You knew how this would end.”

“Is it not enough that you have something no one else has?” James had asked, something like desperation crawling up the back of his throat. “My trust?”

Q had smiled sadly. “You compartmentalise. Make sure no one ever knows all of your secrets. You do it with me, too. It’s good—it makes you a good spy. A professional. But no one ever knows all of you. Not even you.”

For the first time, but not the last, James had been forcibly reminded of the last person who had given him a once-over and taken him apart. Q’s eyes were green, too.

He understood something at last. “You don’t trust me either, do you?”

“Never,” Q had smiled. And then he’d kissed him. A perfect kiss. Just the hint of wine and after-dinner coffee but mostly the taste of Q exploding on his tongue, the smell of him everywhere, something slightly metallic hanging underneath the clean, soft heat of him, probably from all the hours he spent soldering or playing with explosive chemicals. They fit together neatly, James’s hand coming up to catch at Q’s waist, his other hand on Q’s cheek, tipping his head back, drinking him deeper. Q’s own hands fluttering at his shoulders. A dizziness, a headiness, overtook him. Like being drunk on someone else’s presence. Like the absence of pain. Like everything he’d ever wanted.

For a moment, a path had been laid out before him, one where he could convince Q, take him to bed tonight and spend the rest of—his mind stuttered and skipped over that thought, not quite ready to think about _eternity_ yet—convincing him that Bond trusted him, loved him, gave his heart fully and absolutely to him. But the dinner had gotten him to let his guard down, Q’s words had shaken him, he suspected that Q was right and had seen straight through to the root of him after all. In the end, he’d been the one who’d pulled away. Q’s expression, sad but understanding, had said he’d known exactly what had just gone through Bond’s mind. What he had just chosen.

“Thank you,” he’d whispered, “for the lovely night, Mr. Bond.”

After they slept together, Lucia said nothing, except not to go. She wasn’t the kind of woman Q had been talking about, the ones who walked in and out of his life and left their marks indelibly stamped on his soul—she was a means to an end, a reason to use a pleasanter form of interrogation. Access. Intel. Bond felt responsible for her anyway.

He left her Felix’s number and continued on to the Palazzo Cardenza.

– ♠ –

He managed to put Q out of his mind, mostly, as he raced down the winding Rome roads from the Sciarras’ country manor on the outskirts to the heart of the city, but Q’s presence was laced through the car, every loving, elegant detail a testament to his focus and professional pride. He pulled into a lot filled with luxury cars that would camouflage his own nicely and as he sat there he thought suddenly about the ring he had wrenched off of Marco Sciarra’s finger, the one that had served as a sort of proof of identity to Sciarra’s would-be bombers. He slipped it out of the glove compartment and onto his own finger. He didn’t bother changing out of his funeral suit. He knew what he looked like. Perhaps not as ostentatious as the criminal class liked, but every inch the amoral assassin he was.

“Identity yourself, asshole,” barked a guard.

“You can call me _sir_ ,” he returned in Italian, before holding up his hand. The ring worked a treat. He let himself in, not to the main hall but up to the balconies that looked out on it, where substantially more people were crowded and it didn’t seem as though the seating had been prearranged. He did his best to be a forgettable shadow along the periphery, but the further he got, the more unsettled his instincts became. For a—terrorist? criminal?—organisation that clearly had no qualms about collateral damage, an organisation that should have rituals, presence, a name, the people around him were surprisingly blank of identifying tattoos or scars, each as well-dressed as he was and just as skilled at blending into the shadows. It was like he had walked into a conference full of anonymous but powerful businessmen—or paid killers like himself. Both wore the kind of bland threat that was emanating from every man and woman there like a shield.

About twenty people were settled around the massive table below, with a luxurious amount of elbow room in between each one. A man with a lilting accent was talking about control over the pharmaceutical market in sub-Saharan Africa. The head of the table was empty, Bond noticed. Sciarra’s place? But surely there would be more panic, less dry, emotionless drivel about extortion in an organisation that had just had its head lopped off.

A woman was speaking in French now about the placement of “migrated females.” Bond felt his stomach turn as the meeting continued. Counterfeit drugs, trafficking… as other people seated at the table spoke, he added arms dealing and drug distribution to the list, in truly staggering numbers, numbers that outpaced even the most liberal estimates of governments and watchdog organisations. Who _were_ these people?

Finally, a lull fell over the group below. The first man who had spoken retook the floor and finally, _finally_ mentioned what Bond had come for. “After the success of our attacks in Hamburg and Tunisia, the aborted attack in Mexico City and the death of our valued colleague, Marco Sciarra, leaves one of his duties… outstanding.” He looked to the man sitting at the foot of the table, a handsome, smug-looking fellow a few years younger than Bond. “Signor Guerra, the Pale King must be terminated. Will you make the journey to Altaussee?”

Guerra—Sciarra’s replacement, evidently—stood and said in smooth Spanish, “Of course. There will be no more… amateurs.”

A ripple of tension through the crowd. Dissension in the ranks? Looks like someone wasn’t happy with current leadership… whoever that was.

The host’s phone chimed.

The room grew, if possible, even more silent than before. Bond rather thought this wasn’t the sort of meeting where you forgot to put your phone on vibrate. The host reached for his phone, looking pale, eyes skipping over whatever was on that screen—Bond desperately wished he had one of Q’s quaint little cameras or binoculars now—before he cleared his throat and said, “It appears we have a challenger for Mr. Sciarra’s position. Mr. Hinx, step forward.”

From out of the shadows moved one of the most massive men Bond had ever seen, built like a boulder, muscles straining at the seams of the rather nice suit he was wearing. He moved next to Guerra with heavy, deliberate steps and the kind of leashed energy that radiated from tigers on chains and a just-fired gun. “Please state your case to the board,” the host said.

Guerra turned to look at Hinx. Hinx smiled at him.

What happened next was—

Bond had seen a lot of people killed in his lifetime. The cold but hungry efficiency of this murder—the way no one moved to help or even looked terribly interested—even to a hardened killer, it was chilling.

Without a tremor in his voice, the host said, “Welcome, Mr. Hinx. Unfortunately our leader could not be here to greet you tonight—”

“I have spoken to him already,” Hinx interrupted. The air seemed to shiver as everyone held their breath at the mention of someone even these purveyors of nightmares seemed to fear. Bond leaned forward, suddenly desperate to know anything about this elusive leader. “He has a message.”

He was still smiling when he looked at James— _straight at him—_ and said, “It is for our guest.”

He should leave. Now was the time to leave.

But he stood frozen as Hinx said, “Someone has missed you very much, James.”

People were turning to look at him now. Bond’s thoughts trickled by as if they were mired in quicksand.

“He’s closer than you think,” Hinx said, low but in a voice that still carried up to the rafters. “Can you fly, little bird? You should fly.”

Like a lorry slamming into him, a memory—

His arm twisted behind his back so hard that James didn’t even have the breath to scream, a voice at his ear: C _an you cry, little bird? Try it. Cuckoo. Cuckoo._

Numbly, Bond turned to leave. The guard was smirking at him. “Goodbye, _sir,”_ he sneered.

This—this Bond could handle. He smiled his best _fuck-you_ smile, punched him in the face, and hurled him over the side of the balcony. _Then_ he ran.

Out the window, hitting the pavement below with a well-practised roll that wouldn’t bruise at all, and into the car—he had mastered the art of getting into cars fast—as bullets sprayed behind him and clinked harmlessly off the Aston’s hardened chassis. He peeled out of the parking lot, his whole mind narrowed in on the one thought _get out get out get out._

Cool grey-green eyes boring into him across the dinner table—

Behind him, an ostentatious orange Jag roared to life. Bond cast a glance in the rearview mirror and saw Mr. Hinx smiling cruelly at him, in what had to be the most emotion he’d seen from him all night. He wasn’t sticking around to find out what Hinx had planned for him when the man had crushed a man’s eyeballs into his sockets without a single facial tic.

At least a good chase shook off the memories rising to engulf him, faded, dusty pictures from his boyhood now coming thick and fast and clear as day. Hinx’s car had to be modified, too—it couldn’t outpace Q’s finest engineering, but it kept him on Bond’s tail well enough that he couldn’t shake him. Bond eyed the series of switches on the dash. He thumbed one that looked promising—”BACKFIRE”—and watched with breathless glee as the rearview mirror auto-targeted the eyesore behind him—

AMMUNITION NOT LOADED flashed up on the screen. He read it in Q’s dryly exasperated voice. This was probably what he got for stealing the car in the first place, Bond acknowledged bitterly.

Another too-sharp turn through the more secluded streets of Rome, but the car could handle it. God, but this was a bad city in which to be in a car chase. He thought idly about a conversation with Q in which they’d joked about a travel site for agents to review the information actually important to know—efficiency of the hotel staff in removing bloodstains, thickness of walls, access to firearms. He added “ease of high-speed escape” to the list.

Memories crawled up behind him. Fuck it, he could multitask. He called Moneypenny.

She answered on the second ring. Must’ve kept the phone next to her all day. Bond smirked. “Bond?”

“Someone’s been coordinating all of the recent terror attacks,” Bond told her without preamble, the most relevant information first. “Keep you posted on anything else I find out about them, if I survive tonight.”

A new voice fuzzed over the line. Bond’s eyebrows went up as he heard Moneypenny placating her… midnight friend.

“Well,” he said, “looks like there’s a reason we wouldn’t work that you failed to mention.”

“Maybe if you paid attention to anyone else’s life besides your own, you wouldn’t have that problem,” she snorted. “’The Pale King’ is an alias—”

“Well, I didn’t think he’d been christened by that name—”

“Oh, shut up, James, I’m helping you. I’m surprised you didn’t figure it out before, actually. It’s the name adopted by one of the members of Quantum we failed to capture.”

A new barrage of memories struck at him, hardly any more welcome than the ones before. “Mr. White,” he said, low and deadly.

“Precisely.” It had been before Moneypenny’s time, but she spoke with a kind of care that belied just how much access to his files she had. “Last seen in Altaussee.”

“That lines up with what I overheard,” Bond grunted, and ducked down a side street.

“Anything else?”

Bond almost asked her. Almost let the name he hadn’t spoken in twenty-five years cross his lips. “No. Good night,” he said curtly instead, ringing off before he could hear whether or not he’d offended her with his brusqueness. They’d been right, he thought a little tiredly, Eve and Q. He couldn’t help but keep all his eggs in different baskets like a good little spy. Even the people he trusted he didn’t trust with the whole truth. How could he have ever thought he’d be able to give Q the complete surrender that he’d asked for? Be the person he’d wanted?

The next call he wanted to put off. But as he careened onto the banks of the river, he assessed how likely he was to have access to another secured line in the near future and gathered himself up like an adult. “Q,” he said. His phone’s hands-free mode obliged.

This time it took several rings before Q, sounding muzzy with sleep, said, confused, “Hello?”

“Q.”

“Bond?” Q’s voice sharpened and Bond could tell he had just remembered the car. “What’ll it be this time, my left kidney or will you settle for the pound of flesh M will extract from me once he realises you’re gone?”

The unfamiliar unpleasantness of guilt settled heavy in his stomach. He couldn’t ask. Not after what he’d already gotten Q to do. And he knew what it would look like, a man asking after his dead—whatever—on the basis of a pointed remark at a meeting he wasn’t even supposed to be at. A rogue agent chasing childhood ghosts. He thought of Q standing in his infamous pyjamas, bleary-eyed and wild-haired at midnight in London, and lost whatever nerve he’d had.

“Are you all right?” he asked instead.

“Me?” Q sounded bewildered. “I—what—Bond?”

“Never mind,” Bond said. He cast a glance in the mirror behind him and fingered the “AIR” switch. He suspected he knew what that one did. He turned his attention to the “EXHAUST” switch instead. “Go back to sleep, Q.”

“Bond—”

But he’d hung up. Bond took a deep breath, trusted in what Q had already given him, and leapt.

– ♠ –

Q stared at his phone, confused. That had been—odd.

He had his finger on the redial button when footsteps padded out of the bedroom and he felt arms go around his waist. Breath wisped by Q’s ear. A slow murmur into his hair: “What are you doing up?”

“…Nothing,” Q said, and did his best to put the phone, and James Bond, firmly out of his mind. He leaned up for a kiss instead. It tasted like cinnamon toothpaste.

– ♠ –

Bond remembered the last time he’d seen Mr. White. A tastefully massive shoreside villa on the outskirts of Siena. Security measures a minor despot would die for. Blood on the dirt. This was definitely a step down.

The piercing cold and seclusion of Altaussee set Bond on edge. It was like every spa town in the off-season he had ever seen, the harsh beauty of the mountains and firs even sharper and colder without the presence of tourists cluttering up the streets and drives, but he found himself dogged by memory, by the reminder that his parents and the man who had come after had died in places just like this. But that had been true for most of his life, and he’d never had a problem with snowy mountain retreats before. He was just… shaken. Hopefully he’d find some answers here.

Mr. White’s cabin was set far back from town, practically perched among the treacherous rock and ice of the mountainside. Bond stole inside, gun out—not one of Q’s handy inventions, just a regular Walther he’d picked up from some half-legal dealer somewhere—refused to startle as a flock of black-winged birds rose up and flew at his face. The broken remnants of a life everywhere. Someone hadn’t been taking very good care of his living quarters.

The rooms above, the cellar, all empty. Bond paused at a mirror that was set oddly against the wooden boards of the wall. There was a latch on its upper edge. He swung it open to reveal a second cellar. Clever. Not clever enough to stop an assassin. Or Bond.

“Do me a favour,” Mr. White grated out, without even turning to look up at him, “make it quick.”

Bond hadn’t known what he’d expected, hearing the voice of the man who had orchestrated Vesper’s doom after all these years. Hatred, perhaps. The same rage that had driven him to cut a bloody swath through Haiti and Austria and Bolivia and Russia. He hadn’t expected the faint disdain, or the pity. In spite of the agony he had felt at the time, it seemed as though the passage of years had healed over the raw wound in his mind without him even noticing.

Still, he wasn’t inclined to be sympathetic. “Upstairs, Mr. White,” he barked. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mr. White start and turn to look at him. A kind of sadistic pleasure that he’d thrown off the man who’d always seemed so composed, even bleeding and surrounded by enemies, curled in his stomach. Maybe he’d healed. He still wasn’t ready to forgive.

At the creaky dinner table, Bond took in for the first time all the details of his old enemy’s face. Time had not been kind to him, but something was wrong beyond that: he was thin, haggard, his eyes bloodshot not from drinking or from crying but from sickness. He’d needed an IV stand downstairs. Bond sat across from him and leaned back in his chair. “How long have you got?”

“A few weeks, perhaps.” Even his voice was as cracked and dry as paper. “Time enough to say my goodbyes. Get my affairs in order. Though I didn’t expect one of those loose ends to be _you_. What are you doing here, Mr. Bond?”

Instead of speaking, Bond pulled out the ring and set it down in front of Mr. White. He saw the man go even paler. “Where did you get this?”

“Off a dead man.”

Mr. White darted a glance up at him, the shock already fading from his face, his eyes, still shrewd, roving over Bond’s features. “Yes. I suppose he would have to be, before he gave this up. You would have had to kill me to get mine, back when I was welcome among those circles.”

Bond felt a cold thrill go down his spine. So. Quantum had only been the tip of the iceberg. They’d dismantled one arm of a massive terrorist operation and never thought to look beyond their success. “Who is he?”

“Who is who?”

“The man at the head of the organisation. The one you’re all so frightened of. The one who’s sent people to kill you.” The one who knew to call me _little bird._ _Vögelchen_. “Who is he?”

Mr. White started to laugh. “You’re asking the wrong questions again, Mr. Bond.”

“Don’t play games with me, Mr. White. I know all your tricks. Who is he?”

“You needn’t bother,” Mr. White chuckled. “He’ll find you soon enough.”

“ _Where is he?_ Where do I find him?”

“He’s everywhere,” Mr. White exploded suddenly, “ _everywhere!_ He’s sitting at your desk, he’s kissing your lover, he’s eating supper with your _family!”_ Those eyes burned into Bond like brands, like stars. “And he knows you, Bond. He hates you. He will destroy you. Peel away everything you love, everything that you never realised you had, until there is nothing left of you. Until you are a spectre of yourself.”

“Is that what he’s done to you?” Bond said softly.

Mr. White leaned back, calm again. “No. I betrayed him, but not like this. Not like telling you his name. Then he would really destroy me.”

Bond swallowed back the slowly rising sense that he knew exactly whose web he had stumbled into. Time enough for soul-deep horror later. He had to keep a level head when dealing with Mr. White, who had been playing the game even longer than Bond. “You’re a dead man walking, Mr. White,” he said, searching the man for cracks, for the inevitable weakness. “You don’t seem the sort to cling to life for yourself, so who are you trying to protect with your refusal? Who are you afraid he’ll go after for retribution?”

Mr. White was silent. A woman, probably. A wife. Or daughter. Bond leaned forward. “She’s dead anyway, you know. Your life is the only thing that has bought her this long. Tell me, help me bring him down, and she’ll be safe. Or trust her to his tender mercies.”

At last, that got a shudder out of him. They sat in silence for a moment, chess pieces strewn between them. A game that would never be finished.

“The Hoffler Klinik,” he said abruptly. “Ask her about L’Americain. Give me your word.”

Bond did. Mr. White smiled bitterly and shot himself with the gun Bond had placed in his hand. Bond never looked away.

– ♠ –

Moneypenny and her handsome immigration lawyer were on time, but Tanner and his wife were late. Q bustled them all inside, relishing in having nerves over something totally mundane like whether his friends would like his boyfriend, not whatever latest world-ending escapade James Bond had gotten them into. Moneypenny took one look at Q’s date, raised an eyebrow, and immediately ducked by his ear to whisper something lewd about his penchant for older men, so that was a start, even if Q’s ears stayed red for the first ten minutes of dinner.

Dinner went well; nobody embarrassed Q, which was the main thing. He began to think that he had actually pulled it off when his phone buzzed its emergency ringtone as he was dishing out the cheesecake he’d bought for dessert. Moneypenny and Tanner shot him understanding glances. He sighed and pulled it out under the table.

M had emailed him a headline—LUXURY CAR WRECK PULLED OUT OF TIBER—and a terse, “My office. 0800.”

Q gritted his teeth. That fucking prick.

Only a hand on his thigh brought him back to the moment, where he had at least thirty minutes of post-dinner entertaining over drinks and dessert to do before he could seethe in peace. “All right, darling?” Q relaxed, or tried to relax, as accented vowels rolled over his ear.

He smiled tightly. “Fine,” he said. He could see that he wasn’t fooling anyone except maybe Moneypenny’s lawyer, but the hand on his thigh squeezed and he felt a little tension leave his body. “Thanks,” he mouthed, as his boyfriend took over most of the conversational and wine-fetching duties, leaving him to stew like he wanted.

“Thank you, Professor,” Tanner said politely as he was handed another glass of red. Looked like Maryam would be driving tonight.

“Oh please,” Q’s partner smiled. “Call me Ernst.”

– ♠ – ♠ – ♠ –

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The "dubious consent" warning: Oberhauser/Blofeld has sex with Q under false pretenses.


	2. my hunger burns a bullet hole

– ♠ – ♠ – ♠ –

The moment Bond set eyes on Dr. Madeleine Swann, foreboding filled him. Madeleine Swann was beautiful, as polished as a river rock, damaged, dangerous, in peril. It was as though Q had drawn up specs for the woman with whom he refused to share Bond and brought them to breathing, judgmental life. He watched her run her finger down his sardonic answers to the clinic’s intake form and felt a shiver of desire that was entirely unlike the low, slow-burning thing in his chest that hung on Q’s every word. This was short-fused, explosive, a quick attachment that burned out just as quickly but might, like Q had said, take a piece of him in the process. This was consuming, not sustaining. 007’s passions, not James’s longings.

Swann’s cool detachment defied a record that spoke of incredible competence and achievement: Oxford, the Sorbonne, _Médecins Sans Frontières_. And then here, pandering to rich neurotics who wanted to talk to her about how having that much money made them feel. Everything about her was professional: her dress, her manner, her unsmiling expression. And yet Bond rather thought she was withering away, or perhaps freezing over would be a better metaphor amid these snow-capped peaks; as remote and as beautiful as a statue. As Q.

“Do you consider your employment to be psychologically stressful?” she asked.

“Who doesn’t?" he smiled, a humourless joke. "What about you, Dr. Swann? Do you like it here?”

She froze. Just a flicker, but it was enough for Bond to see the terror. Five years ago Mr. White had dropped off the grid, no longer communicating with the dregs of Quantum or, as far as MI6 could tell, any other criminal contacts. Five years ago, Madeleine Swann had quit her job with Doctors Without Borders and moved to an isolated health clinic in Austria when her father had betrayed the most dangerous man in the world. She knew what was coming for her. She just hadn’t counted on him to get there first.

“My job satisfaction is hardly relevant to your psychological profile, Mr. Bond,” she said frostily. “Shall we continue?”

He waved her on. She continued to probe clinically at the shadows of his psyche. His drinking. The loss of his parents. His guardian. 

A memory: two boys and a man on a mountain. He shoved the image out of his mind as she went on.

“What is your occupation?”

Not long after they had started working together, Bond had returned a particularly pointed jab of Q’s with, “Who kills people for a living, you or me?”

The comms had crackled as Q was silent for a long moment. Then he’d said, “Neither,” in a voice of unnatural calm.

At the time, Bond had rolled his eyes. He’d known Q was young, but Q’s competence and composure had made him think that he was past the shine and idealism of the early days of a career in espionage. Evidently not. “If the reality of the job makes you uncomfortable—”

“It’s not the _reality of the job._ You are not paid to kill people, Bond. You are an agent in the employ of Her Majesty. Your job is to gather intelligence and respond to threats against the safety of the British people. Sometimes that involves killing people. Sometimes a lot of people. Sometimes worse. But if that was all we needed from you, we’d just hire a contract killer, who, by the way, would probably spend less on luxury hotels and impeccably engineered gadgets.” Q’s voice had gotten harder and quieter at the same time. “Do you really think _I_ don’t know _the reality of the job_? I’m with you on every mission, I have more casualties than all of the double-ohs put together, I’m the one in your ear telling you who deserves to live and die. I know what it costs, Bond. But it’s not all you do. And it’s not who you are.”

When he told Swann, “I kill people. Small world?” that was what he was thinking of.

She narrowed her eyes and leaned forward, but her studied distance never wavered. She looked as though she were discussing the relative merits of SSRIs in treating depression. “Where is he? Who are you?”

“He’s dead. As for who I am, the relevant file is right on your desk.”

“MI6, then. I’d spot that arrogance from a mile away. Are you here to kill me?”

“I’m here to protect you.”

Swann laughed derisively, the first crack in her otherwise impeccable mask. “That’s a good one. You? Protect me? You can protect me by getting out of my office.”

“But we’ve only just begun to know each other,” Bond purred. 

“I don’t consort with paid killers,” she said, ice shading her tones. “That was my father’s job. Not mine.”

“Your father’s the one who asked me to look after you.”

“And what do you want in return?” she asked shrewdly. 

“L’Americain,” Bond said, watching her expression closely.

She met him glare-for-glare. Swann stood and gestured to the door. “Get out.”

Bond didn’t move. Her gaze sharpened. Something wild like a caged animal clawed behind her eyes. Grief and fear and bubbling rage. “Get _out,”_ she said at a volume that would have drawn the attention of everyone in the lobby below had the glass walls not been soundproofed. “If you’re not out in ten minutes, I’ll have the guards throw you out.” Bond, a few catastrophic exceptions aside, knew how to tell whether people were bluffing. She wasn’t.

“Dr. Swann,” he said cordially, and left.

At the bar he brooded over why the banter and flirting expected from him had fallen so flat, seemed so hollow. She wasn’t interested in him—fair enough. Still, usually he could charm people into doing what he wanted. Obviously, he reminded her of her father. Bond wondered whether or not that would help or hinder his attempts to seduce her into compliance. Wondered at how that skinny, absurd boy had wormed his way into his head and thrown off his technique.

“Vodka martini,” he grunted when the barman attempted to subtly indicate that if he wanted to sit there, he needed to buy something.

“I’m sorry, sir. We don’t serve alcohol here.”

Perfect. Bond moodily added “the idiocy of a dry resort” on his list of things to brood about.

“He’ll have the prolytic digestive enzyme shake,” said a familiar voice from behind him. For the first time in his life, a pleasant ghost appeared in his peripheral vision. Q slid onto the seat beside him, wearing a jumper that looked as comfortable as it was ugly. “Bond,” he said pleasantly. Bond wasn’t fooled. Q had taken that same tone right before handing him that bloody watch.

Also, he’d just insinuated that Bond was constipated. Prolytic digestive enzyme shake indeed.

“What are you doing here?” Bond said, clipped and annoyed, pushing down the brief—whatever—that had flared inside of him when Q had spoken. 

“The question, Bond,” Q said, and now he could hear the strain in his voice underlying that thin layer of cheerfulness, “is what are _you_ doing here? Here, in a private clinic in Austria, trying to wheedle alcohol from the barman, instead of at home, in London, where you _should be_? Where I told M you are? Where, if you don’t return, Moneypenny and I will be summarily sacked? If I’m no longer able to feed my cats, it’ll be on you.”

“I can’t go back yet, Q.”

“Are there no psychiatrists in London? Far be it from me to discourage you from seeking professional help, but this seems a bit excessive. I did what you asked, Bond. I put my career on the line for you—again, I might add—and now it’s time for you to repay my trust by stopping this, whatever this is, and coming home. Now.” His voice was cool but unyielding. It was the voice he used as a handler for bullying recalcitrant agents into following his orders. Listening to that voice had saved his life in the past. Now, Bond shook his head.

“Trafficking, drug scalping, narcotics, arms deals, and three attempted terror attacks in the last two months.”

“What?”

“They were meeting in Rome,” Bond said. For a moment everything else floated away and he was back in a briefing room with Q, going over the details of his last mission. “Members of a global crime network so extensive, so well-integrated into the fabric of our world, that we didn’t even know about them, apparently responsible for everything from surging drug prices in Liberia to high-profile abductions in England. They’re gearing up to something with the recent attacks. I need to find out what.”

“A global crime—you know what you sound like, right?” Q demanded. “Have you gone absolutely, utterly, entirely mad?”

Bond met his eyes. “No.”

“I—well—” Q looked away, a flush rising high on his cheeks at Bond’s challenge. Q trusted him. Bond knew that. Whether or not he could return the favour, Q had proved again and again that, at heart, he trusted Bond to get the job done in a way only the former M had, at least before she’d had him shot off the Varda Viaduct. “Even if you’re right about this, you need to go through the proper channels. You can’t just go haring off—”

“Submit a report to be reviewed by C and his little committee?” Bond asked derisively. “Drop the rule-following act, Q. You know that if I’m right about this, this is the only way we stand a chance of stopping whatever might be coming.” He dealt the lowest blow. “You used to trust me.”

“And look how that worked out for me,” Q sighed, but Bond had won. Q’s fingers tapped anxiously on the counter, a rare nervous tic from a person with so few natural tells. “What do you need from me, then?”

Supporting documentation to turn my hunch into a reality, he almost asked. Sanction from M to continuing pursuing this without people interrupting me every other day to try and get me to go home. Intel and strategy for finding L’Americain. But he looked at Q’s eyes, at the weariness writ large beneath them, and swallowed whole whatever he’d been about to say.

“For now, nothing,” he said, an awful tenderness in him. “Go home, Q. You shouldn’t be here. Too exposed.”

Q pursed his lips. “007—”

Oh, his designation, which Q only broke out if he was really in for it. “Really,” he said more gently. “I’ll get in contact if I need you.”

Q closed his eyes and exhaled deeply. “Fine. Best of luck, Bond.”

He was halfway to the door when Bond said, “Wait. There is something.”

Bond hesitated, but Q’s curious gaze turned on him gave him a surge of courage. “There’s a name I need you to run—Franz Oberhauser.” The name felt bitter and ashy on his tongue. It felt wrong to be saying his name to Q, who was the brightest thing about the new life he had built from himself out of the ashes of the smouldering wreck Franz Oberhauser had left him. “Anything you can find. Please.”

Q nodded slowly. “All right. I… I’ll see what I can do. The Pevsner. Room 12.”

“I’ll be right behind you,” Bond said. He watched Q go. It was safer this way; spies always left a rendezvous separately. Anyone tracking one of them would have no reason to suspect they were associates. Still, his gaze lingered a little too long, a little too protective, proprietary, for Bond to convince himself he was just making sure a colleague got away cleanly.

Out of curiosity—which he knew would one day be the death of him—he took a sip of the shake Q had ordered. Vile.

Bond had just stood up to leave himself when for the second time that day, a voice he hadn’t been expecting to hear rang out behind him.

“What happened to my father?” Madeleine Swann asked. He turned and found her as inscrutable as ever, but there had been a fault in her voice, the faintest of flaws in the facade. Her body language was not hostile, but defensive, like she was bracing for a hit.

Bond considered her, weighed his words. “He was poisoned,” he settled on. The pallor, the shaking hands, the sunken eyes—thallium, probably. Mr. White’s employers had gotten to him long before Bond could do anything about it. She didn’t need to know it was Bond’s gun that had ended it.

“And the ones who killed him. SPECTRE. You think they’re after me.”

This needed no qualification. “Yes.”

“Why? Why aren’t you?”

“I want your secrets,” Bond said honestly. “They want them to die with you.”

Madeleine swallowed and tipped her chin up. He could see traces of her father about her—in the severity of her gaze, the elegance of her hands. Her fear. “Fine. In exchange for your protection, I will take you to L’Americain.”

“Well,” Bond said, “that was much simpler than what I had planned.”

“What was that?”

“I was going to kidnap you and drag you across the continent by force,” Bond said cheerfully. “Come on. We have a stop to make first.”

– ♠ –

The Pevsner was an upscale but not ostentatious hotel perched at the edge of Altaussee proper. Bond wasn’t quite sure what the point of places like this were; who would want to live like they were in a budget bed-and-breakfast while paying enough for an expensive room where the mirrors were edged in gilt? Q, apparently. It explained his terrible designer jumpers, anyway.

A thought about what it might be like to spoil Q, to force decadence and top-notch room service on him, flitted across his mind and was viciously, mercilessly suppressed.

He kept Swann behind him as he stepped down the hall. He’d just been ten minutes behind Q—surely not enough time for him to have gotten into trouble. Still, the silence that stretched between his knock and the door opening dragged out for a long, tense moment. High-level assets only stayed in safe houses when they were in the field specifically because hotels were so insecure; an agent like Bond could protect himself, but Q would have been defenceless, anyone could have just _taken_ him—

Q stuck his head out through the crack. He looked pale; his hair was even more dishevelled than usual. “Good, good,” he said distractedly. “Bond. Come in.”

He shot a curious glance at Swann when she followed him in and Bond knew what she must have looked like to Q, the same thing she represented to him: his fear of commitment come to walking, talking, statuesque life. I’m sorry, he wanted to say. I didn’t bring her here to make a point, or to flaunt her in front of you. I brought her because she was scared and you’re the safest place I know. What came out was, “What have you found?”

A strange look passed between Q and Madeleine before Q turned to his laptop. The familiar biohazard stickers and heavily sellotaped case quieted something in Bond, like a semi-domesticated animal settling down at the hearth. Q adjusted his glasses, businesslike but carefully not looking at anyone else in the room. “I was able to confirm your suspicions, 007. There has been a slight but statistically significant uptick in every area of criminal activity over the past two decades consistent with one organisation with many sub-syndicates controlling and facilitating illegal activity across the world.”

“Q, I didn’t ask you to—”

“I know.” Q reached for the TV remote. “I wanted to.”

Bond looked. CNN blasted out at him. Smoke, destruction everywhere, but he recognised the skyline, even without having to read the caption. Cape Town in flames.

He’d started all of this by stopping Marco Sciarra from blowing up a stadium in Mexico City on the Day of the Dead and killing hundreds, maybe thousands. But for the first time, the stakes felt terribly, soberingly real. He wished he could find a drink somewhere in this godforsaken town.

When he turned, Q was watching him. “Franz Oberhauser?” he said numbly.

Q’s expression softened. Of course, even a cursory background check of Q’s would have revealed what Franz had been to him. Was still. “Just a dead seventeen-year-old in an avalanche,” Q said gently. “I’m sorry, James.”

Bond breathed. Every inch of him, every survival instinct he’d developed when he was a teenage boy being tortured under the Oberhausers’ roof and honed through years of scraping past death, first in the Navy and then as a double-oh, screamed that Q was wrong. Mr. Hinx, Mr. White—they looked at him with a terrifying knowingness that catapulted him decades into the past. They’d said things, things they couldn’t have known unless. Unless the nightmare of his adolescence was still living. Was still real.

But if Q hadn’t been able to find something, no one would. Bond felt himself shift the ghost of Franz Oberhauser into that peculiar state in his mind that was half-repression, half-superstition. It was where his deepest convictions as 007 lay: the convictions that had driven him through missions that no one else could have done, the ones where M had told him to drop it or all the times he had gone rogue, and the righteousness of his cause, and the pure, uncomplicated love he felt for Queen and country. It was there he pushed his soul-deep confidence that Franz Oberhauser was alive. No proof would ever dissuade him, but he knew better than to defy his handlers to carry out international espionage on a _feeling_. Instead he would work two operations at once: the one Q knew about, and the one he didn’t. He would act like he had accepted what Q had told him while being alert to, and prepared for, the possibility that Q was wrong. He would do as he was told, but still believe.

It was rather like what he felt for Q, actually.

“Q,” Bond heard himself say, “go back to London.”

His head jerked up. “What—no! You’re going to need my technical expertise to figure out where these people even got the intelligence necessary to coordinate attacks in Hamburg, Tunisia, Mexico City, _and_ Cape Town. I can be of more help to you here.”

That was true, Bond realised with a sinking heart. That was all true. For something like this organisation—SPECTRE, apparently—something of this magnitude, this subtlety, their skills would far surpass Bond’s basic facility in hacking. He was already protecting one civilian—what was one more?

But. But.

Q, bruised and unconscious. Q, crying out with pain. Q, bleeding out. His mind shied away from more specific scenarios.

He was compromised. And he wanted Q to be safe. Irrationally, unprofessionally, fiercely. He wanted him safe.

“Go home,” Bond said, unyielding as marble, as the sunrise. “Six needs you more than I do. But keep tracking me. Be ready.”

Q shook his head. “Bond—”

“Please, Q.”

And something about that worked. He saw in the way Q leaned back slightly, the slow draining of defiance from his gaze, that Q had given in. Like he had when Bond had asked him to draw Silva to Skyfall, like he had when Bond had asked him to hide him from M and C, like, he realised, he always had when Bond had looked him in the eye and said “please.” Bond wondered what it meant that Q had never been able to say no to him. What it meant that Bond kept asking.

Q packed silently and efficiently. He’d only brought a small carry-on to Altaussee. For the first time Bond wondered how he’d gotten here; he’d never known Q to voluntarily fly unless it was under direct orders from M. When he was done, Q paused at the door and sent one last searching look at Bond and Swann. Bond didn’t think it was exaggerating to say that Q’s gaze had lingered a touch longer on him.

“Be careful,” Q said. Bond expected the usual _with the equipment_ to follow, even though he only had the bloody watch, but Q just looked for another moment and slipped out into the hall. The door closing behind him sounded like a promise.

– ♠ –

When she had been eight, Madeleine Swann had killed a man. It altered her perspective, made her hyperconscious of the ways in which people existed totally independently from her and weren’t just props in her peripheral vision. Her tutors, her neighbours, the men her father killed—they’d all had lies, and loves, and ambitions. Madeleine thought of the jealousies and passions and humour and dreams of the man she had killed and didn’t feel sick, exactly, but acutely conscious of the fact that someone’s world had just been snuffed out at her hand. People had always been fascinating, but they became even more so after the incident. Now that Madeleine knew to watch for it, she caught glimpses of stories she would never be a part of, stories which nevertheless consumed the lives of the people walking past her. It made her good at reading people, and incidentally was also a valuable life skill for the daughter of an international criminal and terrorist. For a long time now, her job had been sorting out the stories of the rich and discontented, helping them make sense of their lives again. And then James Bond.

“James Bond” was probably an alias, but he hadn’t given her anything else to call him by, so James it would be. She hadn’t seen it at first, which she supposed meant he was good at his job. She’d looked at him and seen closed-off, careless, sociopathic, but that was most business magnates she met these days. He’d flirted with her, which was also par for the course, and given clipped, quick answers that made her think that he wasn’t used to talking about himself. It wasn’t until he’d told her, plain as anything, that he murdered people that the curtain of relative harmlessness had finally fallen and he’d let her see the killer instinct in him. Then, she’d had problems of her own, so she didn’t get a chance to really study James Bond, the agent, until they were on the plane to Tangier.

He drank too much, he’d told her during their interview. She watched him order a scotch from the stewardess, then another, and found herself agreeing.

James Bond was extraordinary and unremarkable, a handsome, deadly magnetism haloed around him like every assassin she had ever met. Normally, she wouldn’t have even bothered to get the measure of him. Men like that were all the same. He’d protect her as much as he could, for professional pride if nothing else, but the mission came first, and always would. It had been that way for her father, too.

But in that hotel room, she’d seen something else. The tension that hung heavy between Bond and his friend, yes, but there was something about the way Bond had looked at him, his belief that Q would have something, anything, that he wouldn’t let Bond down. She knew contract killers, but this nearly naïve faith in someone else, that was new. Intriguing. Her scientific curiosity, which had shut off when her survival instincts kicked in, flared to life. James Bond had, against all odds, managed to become interesting.

Bond had left that feeling behind. The way weight had lifted from his shoulders when he’d stepped into the room, the way he oriented towards Q like he was the sun, and still he’d taken Madeleine and gone chasing death again. Bond too was running from something. Bond too was using her as a shield. 

Her entire life, all Madeleine had wanted was to be _safe_. She rather thought that the idea of being safe terrified James Bond beyond measure.

– ♠ –

L’Americain wore its luxury simply. A no-frills sign on the streets of Tangier far enough back from the market that the raucous cries of buying and selling had faded into the distant bustle of human activity, scuffed stone walls concealing a clean, well-lit lobby in the Moorish style softened just enough to be palatable to Western tastes. Not the kind of hotel Bond would have expected someone like Mr. White to frequent, much less leave a valuable clue in. Still, he dutifully tore apart the room in which Swann’s parents had stayed for hidden files, devices, or perhaps a convenient map with the organisation’s headquarters starred in red. Swann watched him and drank room-service wine. Being somewhere her brain had subconsciously designated as safe had relaxed her, and she was only now beginning to process her father’s death. Bond let her have at it. It was hardly as though his coping mechanisms were any better.

Four glasses in, she asked, “Why did you let him go alone?”

Bond didn’t have to ask who she meant. The question had been eating at him since the door had clicked closed behind Q. “I promised your father I’d protect you,” he said, a neutral non-answer that he hoped would shut down any other questions about Q that had been percolating in her head.

Swann said, surprisingly steady and annoyingly perceptive for having consumed over half a bottle of wine, “No, it’s not me you want to protect. You think they’ll come after me. I’m your bait. But him you send home.”

“I’m confident in my ability to keep you safe. Still, no point in taking chances.” She had no idea of Q’s importance to MI6’s infrastructure—she couldn’t—so of course Bond’s protectiveness would look like something else to her. Of course that was what it was.

“No, no. It’s more than that. The look you had when he said he would come… It’s not that you want him there, it’s that you didn’t want him here. With you.”

 _Psychiatrists_. Bond left the shelves alone to slump into a chair facing her seat on the bed and flicked his fingers in a _go on_ gesture. She gave him an unexpectedly genuine smile. “You think everyone around you dies, so you send him away. Safe. But no one can live alone in the world, so you push away the people you care about and hold close to you people you don’t.”

“Is that your medical opinion, Dr. Swann?”

“Perhaps the intuition of an assassin’s daughter.” She took another large swallow of wine and when she spoke, a bit of slur had come into her voice. “Have you ever thought… that maybe you can have something real? Maybe not everybody dies?”

“Who are we talking about,” Bond said, “me or you?”

“I’m mourning healthily. We’re talking about you.”

“No,” Bond said honestly.

Madeleine nodded to herself, as though she had expected nothing less. “You should ask him,” she said, blunt as a bullet. “You’re a kite dancing in a hurricane, but it’s not too late to tether the line.”

“And drag him off the edge with me?” Vesper, Mathis, Fields, Ronson. M. Imagining Q in their place was— “No. I don’t have a choice in this.”

“We always have a choice.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then why,” Madeleine said, suddenly sharply sober, “are you fighting the thing that draws you to him? The inevitable pull of what is meant to be?”

Fuck. It had been a long time since someone had managed to outmanoeuvre Bond. In fact, only three people had ever managed it: Vesper, Madeleine… and Q.

Bond looked at Swann and thought suddenly that he could kiss her, which was his favourite way to settle disagreements. She’d thawed around him on the flight over, and was no longer putting out an aura of hostile disinterest. He looked at the faint gloss on her lips from wine and long-lasting lipstick, imagined how the Cabernet Franc would linger on his tongue. He ought to lean in and taste her. It’s what 007 would have done. But they just looked at each other as the moment stretched out, and he didn’t move, and then it was gone.

“I’m going to bed,” Madeleine declared. “You’re not invited.” She knocked back the rest of the bottle like it was a cheap box wine from Tesco and crawled towards the pillows, still wearing her white silk sundress. Bond looked around the destroyed room and sighed. Mr. White’s secrets stared at him impassively, as inscrutable as ever. 

The Morocco night descended somehow hotter and heavier than the day.

At half past three, an unusually helpful mouse led Bond to the room hidden behind the walls. Madeleine followed him blearily into her father’s secret office, which was in the same disarray as his house in Altaussee. Not the diminished capacities of the dying but a natural part of Mr. White’s character, it seemed. _Probably_ he hadn’t left this place in this state just to fuck with Bond.

In the mess, Madeleine found coordinates. Bond found a map. SPECTRE’s likeliest base of operations was even obligingly starred in red.

“I’m coming with you,” Madeleine said, and when he opened his mouth to protest, shot him a glance so imperious and withering that he closed his mouth again without saying anything. The psychologists at Six could learn something from her.

– ♠ –

The day after he’d left Bond and his—whatever—in Austria, Q finally snatched the only second to himself he’d had in the last three days. M, looking more defeated by the day, had sent him home while the Tube was still running for a change, so Q perched cross-legged on the couch and returned to the search he’d run for Bond. One cat was wrapped around his neck like a travel pillow while the other glared disapprovingly at Q from the bookshelf, where he’d wedged himself in the gap where a dictionary usually was. The numbers hadn’t changed. Still as grim and indicative of a massive network of criminals and terrorists they hadn’t known existed as ever. 

He flipped back to the other search, the one Bond had specifically asked for. It continued to be baffling: the story of a man and a boy caught in an avalanche, totally unextraordinary—except. Except that they had been the foster father and brother of one fourteen-year-old James Bond.

He wouldn’t have asked Q to look this up without a reason. Like it or not, he _knew_ Bond—the terrifyingly efficient killing machine and the surprisingly good cook, the relentless seeker of secrets and the man who enjoyed terrible psychological suspense novels, his internet history and his classified missions and his quick, warm smile. He _must_ have thought the death of Franz Oberhauser was relevant to the mission in some way. But. _How?_

He stared at the picture of that smiling, handsome seventeen-year-old until he could see him even when he blinked. This was his job. It was on him to provide Bond with the intel he needed to complete the task, to find the connection, to make the pieces fit. To keep his agents safe. Automatically, he ran Franz Oberhauser’s photograph through facial recognition software again. Then searched for identities that had been created just as the Oberhausers had died. Then ran the photo through advanced age progression software—

—and at last he saw a jawline he recognised, a familiar amused cast to the eyes—

—and froze at the cool touch of a gun barrel at the nape of his neck.

“Ah,” said his boyfriend behind him. “I knew you’d figure it out eventually. My clever, clever boy.”

The gun traced along his hairline. Q had stopped breathing.

The man who had once been Franz Oberhauser leaned close enough that his lips—lips Q had kissed, had moaned into, had let trace the same path the gun was following now—brushed Q’s hair and said, “The three of us are going to have _so_ much fun.”

– ♠ –

As the train passed from Morocco into Algeria, the landscape outside changed from sun-baked buildings and mostly-paved streets to scrubland, then desert. Swann took the compartment at the end of the car for herself; Bond pottered around, getting his dinner jackets pressed and watching the world flash by. They were some of the only passengers on board, but the service was still impeccable. Convenient that the closest point of civilisation to SPECTRE’s headquarters was a stop on a luxury train line, but even terrorists liked to travel in style.

He checked in on Madeleine often; she seemed amused enough at his concern. They didn’t speak of what they had talked about in the hotel room. Instead, Bond tried to teach her how to use a gun. She indulged him for about ten minutes before she expertly field-stripped his Sig and reassembled it with the air of someone long practised in handling firearms. He desisted.

The day blurred into night. The windows were at the wrong angle to catch the stars, though Bond knew from experience that the expanse of the night sky over the Sahara was one of the world’s most spectacular sights. They drank martinis and dug into lamb tagine and date-stuffed makroudh dripping with honey. He continued not to proposition her.

They disembarked at a place that was less of a station and more of a crumbling ruin. Madeleine fanned herself under the awning, which had been repaired with cardboard in some places; Bond watched the horizon. He wouldn’t have to wait long. Not many people came this way, or got off at this stop. Somebody would have been watching for them.

Out of a swirl of dust, a 1948 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith rose up like a mirage.

Bond let himself and Madeleine be led to different rooms on their arrival. The kind of man who would build his desert stronghold in the heart of a meteor crater wouldn’t have them quietly separated and executed. No, there would be dramatics, an audience, a show. Costumes. A suit had been laid out for him in his spacious, well-guarded guest room. Exact measurements, of course. Only the best for one’s enemies.

It didn’t surprise him at all that there was a single photograph on the minimalistic mantle: two boys and a man, all bundled in ski gear, cheeks bitten red by the cold. He had the same picture stuffed in a box with the handful of flame-eaten documents they’d been able to rescue from the carcass of Skyfall.

At last. At last, Franz had shown his hand.

– ♠ –

Mr. Hinx was waiting for them when they stepped outside. He smiled at Bond, the pleasure of a hunter who had pinned down his prey in his hard, cold eyes. It must have irked him to have lost Bond in Rome. Well, it irked Bond to have lost the car. “Follow me,” he said. Bond kept Madeleine behind him as they moved through airy, windowed halls and down, and down, until they entered a massive room lined with computer screens and hundreds of technicians labouring quietly over what looked like CCTV footage. A _lot_ of CCTV footage.

They stopped near the centre of the room, where several large screens were angled to face them. On one of them was playing—was that M?

M, Moneypenny and Tanner stalwart behind him, speaking to the crowded offices in Whitehall to which most of Six had been relocated. M never addressed the agency as a whole, but that wasn’t what had the hair prickling on the back of Bond’s neck. For security reasons, the CCTV within headquarters ran on a closed network. This had to be internal MI6 surveillance.

How the _hell_ did they have access to MI6’s mainframe?

After Silva, Q had spent weeks hunched over in his office until the wee hours of the morning, plugging every hole and closing every gap. Their security was watertight; not even a mole in Q-branch would have been able to transfer sensitive files to an outside network. This was betrayal on a high level—Q? Bond had barely registered the possibility before he dismissed it, the very thought ridiculous—perhaps M? Or—

Or maybe the man who had been pushing for Six to subordinate its own surveillance to a global network since the moment he had taken power.

He had to get back to London.

Mr. Hinx raised a remote. The screen changed. Bond recognised the scene immediately. _“Your life is the only thing that has bought her this long,”_ his own voice sounded over the speakers, the sound quality crisp as the Altaussee air. _“Tell me, help me bring him down, and she’ll be safe.”_

Bond spun to face Madeleine. She had moved closer to the nearest screen, transfixed by her father’s hoarse, hacking laugh. She didn’t know.

“Don’t,” he said. She didn’t listen. “Madeleine, you don’t want to see this.”

 _“The Hoffler Klinik,”_ Mr. White was saying. _“Ask her about L’Americain.”_

“Madeleine!”

_“Give me your word.”_

On-screen, Bond placed his gun in Mr. White’s outstretched hand. Now, in desperation, Bond reached for Madeleine’s hand and closed his own around it. That, at last, jolted her out of her reverie. She looked at him, eyes wide, horribly aware of what was about to happen, that it hadn’t been the slow solitude of a death by poison that had ended her father’s life but his own hand, with Bond’s gun. “Look away,” he told her. “Look at me.” And she did.

She flinched when the gunshot cracked out. Bond didn’t.

He met her wet gaze steadily, a life buoy for her to cling onto. He'd grown to like Madeleine, wanted to protect her independently of the promise he'd made to her father, even if he couldn't shake the feeling that he cared for her in the wrong way, even if he hadn't been able to kiss her in Tangier. Could you love someone without romance? Bond loved her enough to want to shield her from this, at least.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mr. Hinx press another button. Sarcastic clapping filled the air. He ignored it. “How noble, James,” a new voice oozed from the speaker, and suddenly he couldn’t ignore it any more.

He thought he’d been ready. It had been more than twenty years since Franz Oberhauser had spoken to him, and in that time he’d grown and learned to protect himself and survived torture and even killed people. In an instant, all of that was wiped away and he was fourteen again, creeping through the house in a haze of terrified misery because at any moment he could be _right there_ , and James would hurt, and he would laugh. Lying to his foster father about how he’d gotten the bruises, the scratches, the broken arm. Trapped under the spiked fist of a boy who _hated_ him, and made sure he knew it. He dropped Madeleine’s hand and numbly turned to face the screen, but it was black now. Audio only. For a moment, Franz Oberhauser was exactly what he’d been in James’s memory all these years: a ghost, a voice, an invisible presence always heavy in his head. 

He breathed. Franz said, “You were very careless, leaving that tape for Mr. Hinx to find. But you’ve been careless for a long time, James. With your missions. With your life. With the people you love.”

Bond finally found his voice. “What would you know about love, Franz?”

“Oh,” and that laugh, that laugh that he’d never forgotten, “enough.” A picture flashed up on the screen. Bond’s heart stopped.

Q, smiling an inelegant but gorgeous smile at the photographer, as behind him leaves blazed red and gold. Then a grainy photo of Q asleep on the couch, the fatter of his two cats molded into a furry white lump on his chest. A surveillance shot of Q kissing someone taller than him on the street outside his flat.

A selfie with Q holding the camera, eyes bright, as a man Bond could still recognise after twenty-seven years pressed a kiss to his cheek.

No. No. Q was supposed to be _safe_ —

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you to keep track of your toys?” Franz crooned. The same way he’d used to call him _cuckoo_.

Not him. It wasn’t Q, vulnerable as an open wound, utterly defenceless against Bond’s worst and oldest nightmare. Not him. Anyone but him.

The screen changed again. It took Bond an unforgivable moment to understand what he was seeing. When he did, he realised that he'd been wrong; Franz hadn't been showing his hand in the guest room after all. He'd just been giving Bond a tantalizing glimpse of how he held all the cards, every card that mattered.

In a white, airless room that Bond vaguely recognised, there was Q, tied to a chair, gagged. A dark bloom of bruises surrounded his left eye and cheekbone and he was curled over his ribcage like he was in pain. There was a cut on his cheek where someone had hit him while wearing a ring. He glared at the camera through a cracked lens. He looked exhausted, and defiant, and eminently breakable. Please. Please. Bond felt numb and like he was made out of white fire at the same time. 

“It looks like you came in the wrong direction, James,” Franz said. He stepped out from behind the camera and circled around behind Q’s chair to place his hands on his shoulders. Q flinched. Bond felt like a molotov cocktail someone had just set alight.

“If you don’t let him go, I’ll kill you,” he said. His own voice seemed distant, detached from the monstrous thing in his chest that Franz had awakened that clawed at its cage of rib bones and flesh.

Franz laughed that terrible laugh again. “You think this is the first time I’ve destroyed your world? No, this is not the first time you have crossed me. And this is not the first time I have… retaliated in kind. Ironic that two brothers would end up on the opposite sides of a war.” He dragged his thumb along the side of Q’s face, just grazing his eyelashes and the edge of the livid bruise there. Q closed his eyes and endured it miserably. 

“Let him go,” Bond said, all wit having deserted him. “He has nothing to do with this. _Let him go.”_

“This _is_ the first time you’ve gotten so close to me, though,” Franz continued, as though he had not heard Bond at all. “You have pruned some branches from the tree in the past, but when I learned you were after Sciarra, I knew it was only a matter of time. So the punishment had to be suitably appropriate.” Q made a soft noise through the gag when Franz pressed his thumb into the bruise. Bond’s heart lurched angrily in his chest. He thought for a moment that it might stop beating entirely and he would welcome it, oblivion sweeping away whatever reason Franz had to keep hurting Q, taking off the board the piece that tainted everything around it, killed everything it loved. “So this is for you, James. First, I’ll destroy that thing you love with such embarrassing naïveté, your first love, the one to which you have fed everything else that matters in your life, your precious England. And then I’ll burn the rest of that black heart of yours to cinders.”

His thin veneer of composure was cracking down the middle. “You think this will satisfy you, Franz?” he snarled. “All those years being Father’s least favourite, and you think this will finally soothe your wounded ego? You’re pathetic.”

“No, but it’s a start.” Franz raised his own remote at the camera. Bond wasn’t looking at him; he was looking at Q, hoping that Q could see him, hoping that Q would hear the promise of _I will get you out of there_ thrumming through every fibre of Bond’s being, hoping that Q would hold on for just a little longer, just a little while longer. “Goodbye, little bird. I have something better to do.”

Before the screen had even turned black, Bond had lunged for Mr. Hinx’s gun. It was hopeless. He knew it was hopeless even as the other guards advanced on him, tasers in hand, as he fought and punched and killed or at least seriously injured the men trying to take him down, but the monster in his chest was blood-frenzied, and kept screaming even as a particularly hard hit made blackness descend.

– ♠ –

Bond knew he had failed Q even before he opened his eyes.

He came to slumped against the steel wall of a cell. It stretched six meters above his head and was open to the sky, where a sliver of sun had just edged over the side, and already the heat was bubbling against his skin. A solar furnace. Not the worst way someone had tried to kill him. The agony wasn’t in his impending death, but in what would follow. Franz and SPECTRE would gain control of the UK’s intelligence networks, and so much more. And Q. Q would—

Q would be—

Here, in the stifling silence of Franz’s deathtrap, long after it had ceased to matter, he was able to admit to himself why he had hesitated that night months ago when Q had asked for all of him. He was there, on that mist-slick street outside a restaurant that had once been one of Bond’s favourites, but which he hadn’t been back to since. No one, not even Vesper, had ever wanted all of him before: the man and the agent, the lover and the killer. It was too much of a burden, and he hadn’t wanted to lay that burden on Q, who had stood there, beautiful and whole, and asked for it. He’d wanted to give Q softness and warmth, not the nails and sharp edges of the field. He’d wanted to keep them separate, Q from the way loving 007 would eventually hurt him, and… yes, 007 from the weakness that threatened to infect his iron-arched heart.

In the distance, a metallic clang, probably the guard changing. Dust motes drifted through the hot air.

He should have at least tried. Q should never have been vulnerable to Franz’s machinations. He should’ve stolen all the time he could with Q, snatched a sun-drenched moment here and there from the darkness that crept into every moment of his existence like poison, like 007’s slow poisoning of everything good in James’s life. They should have had coffee dates, inside jokes, kisses goodbye.

He should have stayed dead.

He hadn’t needed for Q to love him to put him in danger. Merely loving Q was enough to get him killed after all.

Shouts down the hallway, muffled through the metal all around him. Bond blinked sweat out of his eyes and lifted his head. Distantly, he could hear the rapid _pop_ of automatic rifle fire. The sound grew louder, and with it came the noises of dying men. In a well-practised move, he shoved the pounding in his head to the side and dragged himself to his feet. Silence fell for a moment, broken only by the hot pulse of his blood in his ears, and then a creak as someone turned the wheel of the door—

“Come on,” Madeleine said, militant as an angel in her lace dress and a pair of combat boots she had stolen from some unlucky guard. “You won’t save him by moping around in here.”

– ♠ – ♠ – ♠ –


	3. when you put your lips to me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments are love, concrit is universe-quaking passion. Find me on [tumblr.](http://midrashic.tumblr.com) If you like my work, buy me a coffee.

– ♠ – ♠ – ♠ –

Madeleine told him the story of her escape as they battled their way out of the cell block, which basically boiled down to someone’s misplaced sense of chivalry causing her to be brought back up to her guest room with a single guard instead of thrown in a solar furnace with four heavily-armed henchmen standing outside. SPECTRE considered her a security issue, not a genuine threat like Bond. Luckily for both of them, her father had insisted she learn certain survival skills, like how to handle an Uzi or punch someone in the throat. The urge to kiss her tickled at the back of his mind, but it was faint and fading. Mostly he felt swamped with gratitude and the panicked sense that somewhere, a clock was ticking down.

They’d almost made it out of the detention wing when Mr. Hinx stopped them.

The two of them had killed most of the guards in the vicinity, leaving Hinx without backup, but he still had the advantage of size and reach. He moved too quickly for Bond to get a lock on him with his stolen rifle and then they were grappling in close quarters, Madeleine shouting as she tried to get a clean shot. It all felt terribly familiar. Bond brought his knee up into Hinx’s gut, but he looked like he barely felt it. Unfortunate that Bond couldn’t say the same when Hinx backhanded him hard enough to send him stumbling into the wall.

Madeleine took a shot and the wall by Bond’s head exploded into flying chunks of plaster. So years of living as a civilian had left her a little rusty. Bond could handle one assassin like the grown-up he was.

Bond’s best quality, the former M had once told him, was his absolutely relentless focus. He could be holding his own intestines in and he'd still try to finish the mission. His head ached, his shoulder was sore, and he’d lost feeling in the entire right side of his face, but he lunged at Hinx like he was in perfect health and sent them both sprawling. Bond’s mind was a mess of competing motivations, England and Q and love and duty, but he knew he had to be back home _right now_ and he had to carve a path through this man to do it. He’d come through worse odds for less.

Their fight swept through the detention wing like a natural disaster. Bond took bone-bruising punches to the jaw, ribs, and solar plexus and left a nice little mark of his own on Hinx’s throat when he’d managed to get his own tie off to briefly use as a garrote. They smashed through, bludgeoned each other with, and shielded themselves with whatever was at hand: an ashtray, a light fixture, the corpses of the men Bond and Madeleine had killed. At one point, Hinx shattered the fluorescent lights overhead with a thrown chair and sparks rained down on their heads. Bond held his own, but Hinx was pushing him farther and farther back, until they were practically where they had started, in front of the cell Madeleine had broken him out of. He could feel the strain in his muscles. Hinx was bigger than him, stronger than him—it had been a while since Bond had met someone as skilled as he was at killing people, and he suspected that Hinx would outlast him if it came to that.

At least he wasn’t a talker. Bond had met enough men who thought a fistfight was the best possible time to give a monologue.

Through the slit in the door of the cell, the steel walls of the solar furnace flashed with blinding light and heat. Bond got an idea.

It was a bit like riding a bull, Bond thought as he used the wreck of the ceiling lights as leverage to get his legs around Hinx’s throat and his arm around his head. Hinx bellowed with anger and try to pry the arm that was covering his eyes off, and Bond held on as Hinx slammed him against the wall repeatedly. Any moment now—any moment—

Disoriented, Hinx hurled himself at the cracked-open door. Bond grabbed for the doorjamb, unwrapped his legs from Hinx’s neck, and sent Hinx sailing into the solar furnace. The sun had to be almost directly overhead by now. He imagined that the heat was excruciating.

Before Hinx got his bearings and managed to rush out at him, a little baked but no worse for the wear, Bond dragged the heavy steel door closed and spun the wheel to lock it. “Enjoy the tan,” he called through the slit. Hinx screamed back in response.

He caught up with Madeleine halfway down the next corridor. She’d eliminated the backup that had arrived during his and Mr. Hinx’s drawn-out dance. “Oh, good,” she said, “you’re alive. The hall where they received us is directly above the cells—”

“Ladies first, then.”

Madeleine pursed her lips. “But—we can’t just leave everything here like this. We need to call someone. Interpol, or your MI6—”

“About that,” he said. “You wouldn’t happen to know where the building’s environmental controls might be, would you?”

She didn’t, but it was hardly difficult to get the answer out of the next guard unlucky enough to cross their path. Bond was unfamiliar with the system, but thankfully not much hacking was involved; like most places, the systems that kept the air conditioning and water running were under substantially less security than the information the facility actually collected. Q had taught him a few tricks in Tianjin, all those months ago, to bypass most basic security measures. He turned off the cooling to the servers and gave it twenty minutes in the hot desert air before they melted into so much unusable slag.

Madeleine watched. “How did you learn to do that?” she asked when he was done.

“A friend taught me,” Bond said quietly. Madeleine said nothing, which was how he knew she’d understood.

It turned out that careful temperature controls hadn’t only been necessary to maintain the servers. Bond and Madeleine were halfway across the grounds when the fire from the server room reached the gas lines.

They felt the explosion as a wave of heat and force and a tremble of the ground even though they were well out of range. Bond watched with mild interest as the explosions jumped from building to building, each blast triggering a new one. Someone would have to reset the “It Has Been ___ Days Since 007 Last Exploded Anything” count in Q-branch that the technicians thought he didn’t know about. Q would have gotten a kick out of that.

Q _would_ get a kick out of that. He wasn’t dead yet. Bond had to believe that. “Come on,” he said. “We want to be out of here before the fire reaches the underground tanks.”

And now—London.

Luckily, Franz kept his secret base well-stocked with a variety of Jeeps, luxury cars, and helicopters. As Bond coaxed the sleek silver copter into the air, the SPECTRE facility went up in a plume of fire and smoke, staining the horizon with red behind them.

– ♠ –

The helicopter had a satphone. He plotted a flight path towards an Algerian airbase that was the nearest thing on the map and called Moneypenny. “You might want to find another mole,” she said in greeting, “given that all of upper management has been dismissed. Although it looks like the rest of MI6 is going the same way soon enough, so it might be a moot point.”

“Q’s been captured,” he said.

Eve paused. When she spoke again, her voice was clipped and efficient, the agent, not the secretary. “How do you know?”

“I saw a live feed in the base of the organisation I’ve been tracking.”

“I trust that particular facility is no longer a problem?”

She knew him so well. “I feel I showed a great deal of restraint, actually.”

“Let me just look up… here. No one’s seen Q since late yesterday night. Today his boyfriend called him in sick—”

“His boyfriend,” Bond said through gritted teeth, “is the head of a globe-spanning multi-branched terrorist organisation called SPECTRE.”

Something in his voice must have discouraged more questions, because Moneypenny didn’t ask, just inhaled sharply. “Fuck,” she said quietly but feelingly. Then, to Bond, “I met him, just a few days ago. Called himself Ernst Stavro Blofeld. He seemed nice. Normal.”

Bond swallowed down the rising tirade about not taking appearances for granted. If Q hadn’t been able to find Oberhauser within his boyfriend’s background check, no one could have. “His name is Franz Oberhauser,” he said instead.

“Oberhauser… where have I heard that name?”

“From my file,” Bond said steadily. “He’s my foster brother.”

Silence fell over the line as Moneypenny digested everything that implied about the current situation he and Q had found themselves in, and into which they’d dragged the rest of MI6 along the way. “Tell me everything you can,” she said at last.

This was the question he’d been dreading. Of course he would have to hand over the trauma he’d kept buried for decades to analysts at Six for them to prod at and dissect, like turning over a mound of dirt to expose the roots of something growing in it. They needed to know everything they could about this previously anonymous adversary, and Bond was their only resource at the moment, the only person left alive who had an inkling of what this man had been capable of back when he had been Franz Oberhauser. But now that the moment had arrived, Bond felt his throat close up, an ingrained response programmed into him by the knowledge that whatever Franz had done to him, it was nothing compared to what he would do if James told anyone.

“Bond?” Moneypenny asked when he had spent too long just breathing and adjusting their altitude.

“James,” Madeleine said from the co-pilot’s seat.

He had to say something. He fixed his gaze on the controls and imagined that it was Q, listening nonjudgmentally over the comms. Just another mission, just another briefing.

To his surprise, it helped. There was trust there, after all. He thought bitterly that without either of them noticing, Q had taken what he’d asked for: the whole of Bond’s heart.

“I stayed with the Oberhausers for almost three years,” he said to a memory of Q’s cool, sympathetic eyes. “Hannes Oberhauser was a family friend. He took custody of me when my parents died. He told Franz to consider me his younger brother. And he did, for a while. But a few months in, Franz began to get… jealous.” He swallowed. He imagined the silence on the line was Q’s, patiently waiting for him to bring himself under control again. “I figured this all out later, of course. At the time, I was bewildered. He resented me for having more of his father’s attention. I suppose even then some of his more antisocial tendencies had made Hannes distant from him.

“The first winter we spent together, Hannes taught me how to ski. When he looked away for a moment, Franz broke my arm.

“He was skilled in both physical and psychological forms of torment.” Bond skimmed over some things—the roughhousing that had resulted in bruises, the constant alertness to the next attack, the way he’d stopped sleeping altogether—the things Franz had said about his parents—everything he said to Moneypenny _would_ show up in his next psych evaluation, if they succeeded in stopping Franz and there remained a Six to threaten him with unpaid leave unless he submitted to psych evaluations. She was a friend, but a member of the executive branch nonetheless. “And he was a master manipulator, even at that age. He always had an excuse or an alibi ready. He forced me to learn how to control my fear, how to shut it off. Showing him fear only spurred him on.”

“I never thought of you as not having always been on top,” Moneypenny confessed.

The funny thing was, he suspected that the walls he’d developed, the way he’d talked rings around the psychiatrists they’d sent in droves after Franz and Hannes’s deaths, had been what had endeared him to M during his candidacy for the double-oh position. He’d hacked her private computer once and seen from the file history that she’d lingered over not the commendations he’d received when he’d been in the Navy, not the reports of the trainers at Six who’d been tasked with hacking him into the shape of an agent, but the long-ago notes of a dozen social service workers. “Demonstrates an inability to form attachments with others,” had written one. “Low to no emotional expression,” another had said. They’d all blamed it on him losing both his parents and his guardian in a space of three years. Franz had been his private demon until Mr. Hinx had looked at him in Rome and called him _“little bird.”_

Once, a therapist had asked him what the most frightening quality he could imagine in a person was. He’d thought of Franz and said, “Someone who never bluffs.”

Franz had never made a threat he couldn’t carry out. Ever.

Bond talked until he was hoarse. At one point, Madeleine put her hand over his, and though it was the wrong shape and too small, he was grateful.

– ♠ –

The Hildebrand safe house was dusty, claustrophobic, and crammed with guns. Madeleine checked it was secure and sat down to wait for her contacts. It was hours after the sun had sunk below the London skyline when she heard two men and one woman clamber onto the fire escape and cautiously open the door. They paused when they saw her; the woman pushed past the shoulders of the men ahead of her and said, “Dr. Swann?”

Madeleine stood and offered a hand. “Ms. Moneypenny,” she said, and shook the hand of the woman whose voice had accompanied her through four tense hours of being trapped in a helicopter with a furious, wounded James Bond.

“What do you have for us?” asked the older man, probably the M James had told her about. Madeleine knew what it meant to have your name stripped to a letter, or sometimes to nothing at all.

“Your surveillance network has critical vulnerabilities. James and I have reason to believe that when your new system goes online, every file, every memo, every corner of MI6 will be made available to a terrorist group called SPECTRE.”

“Nine Eyes goes live at midnight,” said the other man sharply. Tanner, she thought.

“When it does, every operation you are running will be compromised. Every agent in the field will be at risk,” Madeleine said. She looked from one tight face to another; everyone she was meeting with seemed grimly aware of the death and chaos that would result. She got the distinct impression that not only M, but Moneypenny and Tanner too were players of the chess game in which her father and James were only pieces. Friends in high places, it seemed. “Can you stop it?”

“Q might have been able to hack it, but he’s—” Moneypenny stopped, swallowed. “Without him—”

“I don’t have the authorisation to shut it down,” M said. “Without Q here, we’ll have to get C to cooperate with us.”

“If he is the architect of this program, he is a loyal SPECTRE agent,” Madeleine warned. “He will not go quietly.”

“Then we’ll just have to persuade him,” M said.

“Will you come with us?” Moneypenny asked her.

Madeleine shook her head. “I left this life for a reason. This is as far as I go.”

“Tanner can get you to a safe house—”

“Thank you, but no. If you fail tonight, there will be no such thing.”

“Fair enough,” M said. He crouched down, found the Glock taped to the underside of the table, and began to disassemble and check it in quick, efficient motions. He looked up from his work to fix Madeleine in place with his sharp, watchful gaze. “And Bond?”

– ♠ –

Bond was thinking about interrogations.

As an trainee agent, he’d been drilled in the art of resisting torture. The final exam had been given over two days spent locked in the bowels of MI6 in one of the closed, airless interrogation rooms being beaten, waterboarded, and generally worked over by a senior agent—he never learned who. As a double-oh, he’d seen the insides of the cells down on sublevel 2 more often, as an interrogator or simply as a pointed threat to scare whatever poor soul was shackled to the table into cooperating. He rather thought that the former M might have wanted to march him down there after some of his more… theatrical stunts, but the results he got were inarguable, and when they weren’t, Bond had a good sense of how long he needed to stay out of the country while she cooled down.

The room where Q had been held had been dingy and in disrepair, but he’d still recognised the white walls, the mirrored glass. He’d spent long enough staring at that tiled floor, or one just like it, during his own spin through interrogation training. The moment he touched down in London he was aware of where he would find Q, oriented towards it like a compass needle pointing home.

Franz would know he was coming, of course. He’d picked somewhere Bond was familiar with for a reason instead of spiriting Q to a SPECTRE facility far enough away that Bond would never catch up to them. He wanted this, the confrontation, the pleasure of killing Bond’s—the person he—his _whatever_ in front of him. Bond _would_ make him regret it. If it was the last thing he did, he would make Franz regret this.

Under the shadow of the great blasted-out husk that had once been Babylon-on-Thames, Bond drew his gun and came home.

– ♠ –

Q stirred.

His shoulders ached. He reached to rub a hand over his face and was rudely brought up short by the stab of metal digging into his wrist. They’d left his glasses on, but crooked; he squinted as he tried to focus through a cracked lens. Both of his wrists were cuffed to a chain wrapped around a heavy pipe. His arms were already numb and painful. He’d been hanging there for a while.

He didn’t bother looking around. He knew where he was.

He’d been stashed away to keep him from interfering with the launch of the program that would give Bond’s newly-discovered network of terrorists full access to MI6’s files, and also to distract Bond. Mounted across the room were screens, some of which were black or cracked, but the big one at the front of the room was live. They’d cut power to the building long ago, but apparently the emergency solar panels meant to be used as a secondary energy source were still functional. Splashed on the screen was an ominous countdown: NEW SYSTEM ONLINE IN 40:43. A blow to his professional pride, apparently, making sure that he would witness the destruction of everything he’d worked so hard to protect. He could only surmise that the bruises and the cracked rib were meant for Bond.

Nine Eyes was activating in forty minutes and he was chained to a pipe as bait for James Bond. He wondered if perhaps he’d been too hard on Bond’s cadre of femme fatales and ingénues. This was _infuriating._

He tested the cuffs. Tight—but not painfully so. The right one was a little looser. He'd never learned the trick field agents had of dislocating their thumbs to get out of cuffs; if he survived this, that would be the first thing he'd rectify. Still. Never underestimate sheer bloody-minded persistence. Q was good at that.

A meter away a discarded keyboard lay on a desk. He checked the clock. 39:44. He gritted his teeth and began to pull.

Ten minutes later (28:18, the screen read), he reached out a bloody hand, wrist rubbed raw and open where he’d twisted it out of the cuff, and started looking for a back door into the CNS system.

– ♠ –

If he hadn’t already known he was in the right place, Franz had helpfully left clues. 

Bond stepped cautiously to the folded piece of paper taped to the cracked glass of the main Vauxhall Cross entrance and pulled it down. His heart lurched when he understood what it was, but he shouldn’t have been surprised. Psychological torment. It was a still from surveillance footage, him and Q on a perfectly normal day, Q probably on one of his rare excursions from his underground lair in search of food, Bond probably coming in to debrief. They’d stopped to talk to each other, but they often did that. Anonymous office workers milled on the street around them. No way to narrow down when this had been taken.

Q’s eyes had been blacked out. And there’d been a target drawn over Bond’s heart. He crumpled it up and tossed it away. If it was a threat, it was a pointless one. Franz already had the only bargaining chip he would need.

Glass crunched under his boots as he made his way into the lobby; most of the windows had blown out in the explosion. The shadows draped over these once-familiar passages and rooms ran deep. The safety lights barely penetrated the darkness that clung to everything, like the muck and the filth of their jobs had crawled out of their minds and stained their abandoned home. His name had been spray-painted on the memorial wall. Cute.

He headed down.

Analytics. The river access tunnel. The gym. A spiderweb of detonating cord arced over his head. The shooting range, where his own face had been pinned to the targets. Interrogation, where every cell contained a photo of someone he’d loved or hated. And no Q.

He turned the corner toward the side door and fired.

Decades of suppressed fear and paranoia had condensed into an instinctive response to that face that was impossible to ignore. He saw those eyes, as cold and pitiless as ever, he felt the monstrous thing in his chest that wanted Q’s touch and nothing else spike in rage, and he’d emptied out half his magazine before he realised that the bullets weren’t connecting, barely fracturing the inch-thick sheet of bulletproof glass between them. His mind was blank of anything except the reality that he wasn’t a child anymore, that he’d grown into a danger in his own right, that he could finally kill Franz and free himself forever the way he’d sometimes longed to late at night. Franz turned to look fully at him and smiled. Gently patronising, like he was used to Bond being two steps behind him but still found it disappointing. Slowly, thought ebbed back into Bond’s brain. He was breathing hard. He lowered the gun.

“You’ve grown, James,” Franz said. Like they were only two brothers greeting each other after a long absence. “The infamous 007. Father would be proud.”

“Where is he?” Bond growled.

“Of course I’ve read your file. The missions, the seductions, the kills. Stolen satellites, diamond smuggling, missing weapons. Quite the collection of adventures, some of which I was responsible for. Our paths have been running parallel for a long time. You just never bothered to question why everyone you love dies.”

_“Where is he, Franz?”_

“You were always so easy to predict, even as a child. Nearly thirty years and your type hasn’t changed a bit. Dark-haired, clever, sees right through you. When you were promoted, that’s how I knew which of our assets would slip past your suspicion. And when that didn’t work, when the lovely Ms. Lynd didn’t leave you an emotionally crippled wreck, that’s how I knew who to target next.” He breathed onto the glass. Slowly, slowly, his finger traced a shape in the mist. A Q. “This, I think, will break you at last.”

Bond snarled. Without thinking he slammed his fist against the glass. Franz didn’t even flinch. He raised an eyebrow and said, syrupy sweet, “He’s here, of course. In the place where it all began. He’s chained up somewhere in this ruin that is all that’s left of your ideals, and in five minutes, he will die when this building is demolished. You can try to find him, or save yourself.”

“While you escape,” Bond said. A mean smile twisted his lips, though his heart was pounding, though Franz still gazed placidly at him through bulletproof glass. “Do you really think it’ll be that easy? He’ll find you for me. And then I’ll kill you for him.”

“Of course, _if_ you find him, he’ll have a choice as well,” Franz said lightly. “In five minutes, Nine Eyes goes online, and England will be exposed for the vultures and the crows to come pick at her bones. He can go with you and live, or stay and try to dismantle the system in what little time he has left. What do you think he would choose, James? Queen and Country? Or you?”

Bond couldn’t answer. He knew the answer, but all the breath to say it had left him.

“A familiar choice, eh?” Franz said. “Your country or his life. How does it feel to be on the other side for once?”

“You’re bluffing,” Bond breathed. Q was an access key to every database in the world, and if nothing else leverage over MI6. Franz wouldn’t squander him on a childhood grudge. This was a trick, misdirection, to make sure Bond was in the building when it blew—

“Am I? Then I suppose you have nothing to worry about.” Franz ghosted to the other side of his little bulletproof alcove, toward the stairs that Bond knew would take him up to the helicopter landing pad on the roof. He paused at the detonator tacked to the wall. “But I think you know me better than that, _Vögelchen_.”

Franz never bluffed.

He hit the button. Bond began to run.

– ♠ –

M didn’t bother hiding. When Max Denbigh stormed in, he found M seated at his desk, London spread out below them, all light and colour from the ostentatious, terribly insecure monument he had built to his own ego. The moment he was through the door, Tanner and Moneypenny stepped into place, securing the exits. No one would disturb them.

“Didn’t I get rid of you?” Denbigh asked coldly. M smiled humorlessly.

“Better men than you have tried and failed,” he said. “Sit down, Max.”

“It takes a bold man to invite a person to sit down in their own office.” Denbigh’s eyes darted around, probably searching for an opening to get to the gun in his top drawer. They both knew who would win a purely physical contest. M was old, but he still had a few tricks up his sleeve.

“It won’t be your office for much longer. Passing information, consorting with known terrorists, treason… You’ve racked up quite the list of charges.”

Denbigh smiled. “Is that why you’re here? To arrest me?”

“No. I’m here to save your life.” He nodded to the chairs in front of the desk. “Sit down. We have time.”

Denbigh sat, but his smile only grew. “That’s where you’re wrong, M.” He gestured to the displays lining the room, each of which was counting down inexorably to the launch of Nine Eyes. “You have no time left at all.”

Without Q, their only hope of disarming Nine Eyes before it activated was the man in front of him, the man whose eyes shone with the light of the fanatic and whose shoulders were set with the arrogance of someone who had never lost before. M was fighting an uphill battle, and he knew it. There was every chance that he would fail tonight, and the country would suffer.

But a long time ago, before he’d been M, he’d been an interrogator. A good one. He’d lost his career in the Army, half the range of motion of his right knee, and his name since then, but he hadn’t lost the skills. Here, with only minutes left to midnight, he donned that persona like an old coat and felt it settle, warm and familiar, over his shoulders. “I have enough,” he said.

He let his gaze sharpen to a lethal point. “You’re going to enter the kill code for Nine Eyes.”

Denbigh laughed. “Why on earth would I?”

“I suppose it would be too easy for you to just accept that it’s the right thing.”

A snort. “The right thing! I _am_ doing the right thing, M, only you can’t see it. You’re so blinkered by the past, you can’t see what has to be done to secure our future.”

“Like working with terrorists.”

“Like working with _visionaries._ The world is changing, M, and it’s leaving you and your precious double-ohs behind.”

“We’ll change with it. But not like this. Not by opening our doors to an organisation like SPECTRE—oh, yes, we know about SPECTRE—and not by compromising everything we believe in. Not because of you.” M turned the laptop to face Denbigh. His login screen blinked obligingly at them. “Take down the system, and we’ll go easy on you. No extraordinary rendition, no enhanced interrogation. Maybe a chance at parole if you’re lucky, who knows.”

Denbigh smiled nastily. “I really thought you were going to go with the stick, instead of the carrot. Do as I say, or I’ll torture and/or kill you.”

“That’s still on the table.”

“The problem with all your threats, _M_ , is that they are totally, astonishingly empty,” Denbigh sneered. “You know the moment that system goes online, you lose all the power, all the leverage. Face it. As long as Nine Eyes exists, I win every time.”

The screen flickered. Both of them turned to look. As one, all of the screens in Denbigh’s office flickered again, then turned red. The countdown was replaced with a black window informing them that the system had encountered an unexpected problem and needed to shut down. In front of their astonished eyes, the displays stuttered and stopped like a guttering candle, a brute-force attack on Nine Eyes keeping it from deploying, an unsubtle, unpolished assault that had suddenly bought M time, precious time.

Q. This was Q, somehow. Bond must have found him and gotten him somewhere safe, somewhere he could launch an external attack on the CNS servers. M probably ought to give them both a pay rise.

“Well, Max?” M turned back to Denbigh, savouring his slack-jawed horror. “It looks like you’ve already lost. Take down the system. Or we’ll bring it down around your ears.”

– ♠ –

The once-familiar rooms and hallways, now abandoned and bleached in red light from the warning lights, raced by. Accounting, HR, the training facilities, the canteen. He could barely hear the alarm over his own ragged breath. His whole world had narrowed down to classic search-and-rescue technique: “Q!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, waited ten seconds so he wouldn’t drown out a possible response, and then called again, _“Q!”_

His voice and the alarms and the terrible silence echoed back at him. He kept running.

He knew this building, knew its bones, every shortcut and dead end and alcove, he’d probably spent more time in this place than at all of his old flats put together. And he knew that he would never be able to search all of it in time. If he just had a hint, anything, anything to narrow down 250,000 square feet into something manageable. One last impossible escape, one last death-defying high-wire act, not for himself, but for Q. But adrenaline and fear had soaked through his brain, leaving it blank but for Franz’s sneer and a mindless refrain of _Q, Q, Q_ in his head, like a heartbeat, like a clock counting down.

Four minutes. Fifty-nine, fifty-eight…

Think. _Think._ Franz wouldn’t have just stuffed Q in a closet somewhere, he’d put him somewhere that had symbolic or personal importance to Bond. The double-oh offices were on the other side of the building and Bond had never spent much time in there anyway. M’s office, maybe. Or somewhere important to… to Q.

Fuck. He was an idiot.

Somewhere Q associated with death, somewhere he could watch from as Nine Eyes systematically dismantled his life’s work. Franz had sealed the weak point in Bond’s heart inside the the strategic vulnerability at Six’s heart.

Bond turned on his heel and aimed himself toward the smoke-bitten wound that Silva’s attack had torn into the building’s side. He knew the way to Q-branch like he knew the contours of his own gun.

A year ago, Raoul Silva had hacked into MI6’s systems, arranged a fatal build-up of gas directly directly beneath M’s office in Q-branch, and blown a hole the size of a house into what had supposedly been the most secure location in London. He’d killed four members of Q-branch, the former Quartermaster, and an unlucky agent who’d been getting briefed. Q had spoken to Bond about it once, very late in the night, with a melancholy bitterness he couldn’t disguise. When Six had shattered, he'd been in one of the labs nearby and had half-carried out a fellow tech who’d been concussed by chunks of the building coming down around them. Bond wasn’t sure if the dark undercurrent in Q’s voice had been guilt that he’d come out relatively unscathed and with a promotion, or the trauma of seeing death up-close.

Bond never saw the blast site after he returned to London; he’d been too busy coming back from the dead.

He remembered Q-branch as being perpetually brightly lit, with multiple missions being run at any given moment, technicians and handlers hunched over banks of computers that monitored everything from an agent’s vital signs to trending Twitter tags in the country in which they were stationed. All of that was gone. Where the floor had been, a huge crater gaped open all the way to the ground floor. Screens and wires hung lifelessly from where they’d been mounted high on the walls, except for the main screen from which critical missions had been run, which was displaying some kind of code scrolling too rapidly for Bond to read. And standing beside it was—

“ _Q!”_ he yelled. Q looked up. Still bruised and scuffed and the most wonderful and terrible thing he had ever seen. An indescribable combination of shock, sadness, and gratitude flooded his face.

“Bond?” he said softly, barely audible over the drone of the alarms. Three minutes.

Bond, perhaps not as carefully as he should have, skirted the hole in the floor to draw up next to him, drinking in his surprise and his confusion and his softening eyes. Bond allowed himself a moment of pure, sweet relief before he assessed the situation; Q was chained to a pipe by his left hand, the right was—covered in blood, the ridiculous, idiotic boy must have wrenched himself free of the other cuff—otherwise he looked no more injured than he had been when Franz had taunted him at the desert compound, and Bond let the fear he hadn’t noticed he’d been carrying drain out of him even as he looked for a handy crowbar or lockpick to get the chains off. “Come on,” he said, reaching for Q’s free hand, which was laying on the keyboard. “We need to get you out of here.”

“James,” Q said, “I can’t.”

He’d known. He’d known it was coming, but he’d managed to push it aside and now the horrible reality of Q’s loyalty and sense of duty crashed over him. He forced himself to look up at the screen and dully recognised the CNS logo. “I’m knee-deep in Nine Eyes,” Q explained, eyes searching Bond’s for understanding. “We have to bring it down. We can’t let Ernst—Blofeld—whoever—win.”

Q had partially freed himself and used the old network links to let himself into Nine Eyes. Clever. Bond wished fiercely Q was just a little less clever.

“Q,” he said, trying to remain calm, “we have less than three minutes left, even you can’t—”

Q turned back to the screen, his fingers leaving bloody marks all over the keyboard. Luckily he was a touch-typist. “That’s long enough. Three minutes will be enough.”

“Not if you want to live!” Bond snarled.

Q’s hand stilled on the keyboard again, but he didn’t look at Bond. “It’s the cost, Bond,” he said softly. His voice ached like a bruise, like Bond’s heart. “You know better than anyone, it’s the cost. It’s the promise we all make. For Queen and Country.”

“Not you,” Bond said roughly. “Not you.”

Q met his eyes. Bond’s hand drifted up to run down his cheek and jaw, avoiding the bruises, for once not the start of a seduction but a moment of closeness Bond couldn’t help but greedily hoard, here at the end of all things. Q’s eyes fluttered closed. “You should go,” he murmured.

“No,” Bond said, and found that he had never meant anything more in his life.

Distantly, the alarms wailed plaintively. Two minutes.

Q dragged himself away from Bond’s touch and started working again. He’d only typed a few lines when the screen turned black and a window declaring SYSTEM SHUTDOWN popped up. Startled, Q jerked his hand away from the keyboard, as if it were an animal that had gone unexpectedly feral. “What is it?” Bond asked sharply.

“The system… it’s going through proper shutdown procedure. As though someone voluntarily entered the access codes and deactivated it.”

“M,” Bond said. Fine, he admitted grudgingly to the ghost of the former M, wherever she was. Bond would give the interloper a chance. _“Now_ will you leave?”

“Yes, fine!” Bond immediately turned to the chain and pulled, but of all things not to have suffered a little damage from the explosion, the pipe held annoyingly fast. “James,” Q gasped, “your watch—”

He glanced down at the watch Q had bitchily given him at the start of all this, the only thing he hadn’t managed to lose in his continent-spanning trek over the past week. “What?”

“The watch—I lied about the watch—”

Fuck. Bond loved him, loved him, loved him.

He had the watch off in a moment and fixed it to the far end of the pipe. “What’s the activation code?”

“007,” Q said. Bond glanced at him, confused. “0-0-7,” Q repeated, a hint of a smile on his lips.

Bond turned the bezel to zero, then zero again. The moment it spun to seven, he was in motion, dragging Q into his arms and crouching to protect him from any shrapnel. The watch exploded in a powerful, thankfully well-contained burst that didn’t set off any of the other explosives in the room. When Bond glanced up, the pipe was missing half its length. He jerked the chain off the pipe and Q gasped with relief as his left arm was freed.

Bond drew him close. They were on the edge of the huge hole in the floor. “Trust me?” he murmured.

_“Never.”_

Bond grinned and kissed him. It was quick, just a taste, but in that kiss he tasted oceans, worlds, entire lives. He held Q tightly, as though if he tried hard enough he could let Q crawl inside of him and never leave, carry him around always, safe and guarded. When he let go, Q blinked at him. Bond took the opportunity to sweep him up and jump.

They fell—

—and hit the safety netting on the ground floor hard. Their impact tore one of the corners free, and Bond and Q tumbled down the slope of the netting and ended up dusty and breathless on the floor. Bond kept a firm hold of Q’s hand as he rolled onto his feet and headed for the tunnel that led out onto the Thames. One minute.

– ♠ –

The speedboat moored in the access tunnel was as old and decrepit as the building, but when Bond hotwired it, it wheezed to fitful life. Q had collapsed in the stern, the day’s events having finally caught up to him. Thirty seconds. Bond kept his focus on navigating the tunnel, but felt part of his attention always with Q, hyperaware of him like a part of his body he had lost and found again. Slowly, the small square in the distance that was the river and the night lights of London grew. Ten seconds.

“Don’t think,” Q said where he was sprawled in the back, that familiar, beloved sharp edge having returned to his voice, “that you’re forgiven just because you rescued me. I’m still cross at you over the car.” Bond was startled into laughter. Two. One.

The first explosions rattled the concrete around them. Behind them, the tunnel started to fold in on itself and crumble. They were outracing a wave of dust and debris. “Any day now,” Q sniped in the exact same mildly bored tone he used whenever Bond had gotten himself into mortal peril on his missions. Little berk. Bond felt his chest swell with affection.

They burst out into the night moments before the tunnel collapsed entirely. Breathing hard, feverish with adrenaline, alive.

Overhead, the lights of a helicopter that had lifted off the roof of the former MI6 building just before the walls had given way blinked pensively in the sky.

They were halfway across the river before Q managed to drag himself upright. He moved close behind Bond, his body a warm line of heat in the chill of the Thames in November. Bond tracked the helicopter’s progress. He had no doubt that with Q’s help, he would be able to find Franz long before another twenty years had passed. But he found the thought of Franz out in the world, plotting death and pain for himself and Q, abhorrent. He glanced over to Q, whose sharp eyes were also fixed on the lights above. “Can you take over?” he said. Not demandingly, but softly. An option, not an order.

Q took the controls without hesitation. Bond pressed a quick kiss to his hair in thanks. Then he drew his gun and took aim. He only got off two shots before Q shouted, “Oh, you lunatic!” and shoved Bond back toward the console. “For God’s sake, give me that.”

Bond had never seen anyone assemble a makeshift RPG launcher out of a battered Walther PPK, the nonessential parts of a boat engine, and a pocket screwdriver in under two minutes before. It was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen. “I love you,” he blurted out.

Q ducked his head to hide a smile. When he looked up, Bond could see something strange and hot and consuming burning in his eyes, too. “I—would like you to shoot that helicopter down, please.”

Bond made a gesture vaguely like a salute and then proceeded to do what all good agents did—as his Quartermaster said.

– ♠ –

The helicopter came down in a blaze of light and heat and screaming metal, a second sun over Westminster Bridge. Q drew the boat up to the bridge stairs clumsily but without capsizing or grounding them, which was the main thing. Before he went up, Bond stole another moment to savour Q's hand in his. He climbed the stairs and emerged to a scene of chaos, people milling about the barricades and, smack in the middle of the bridge, the smouldering wreck of Franz's best-laid plans.

A man was crawling away from the wreckage. Could be the pilot, could be a bodyguard. Bond was never that lucky. He walked up to him and faced Franz through a mist of blood and hatred.

When the helicopter had gone down, a piece of shrapnel had scratched a long, livid line through his right eye and cheek. Bond looked at him and almost couldn’t recognise the boy that had left such an indelible mark on his life. Bond looked at him, the poisoned root of it all, the reason he had wanted to learn how to protect himself and then to protect others, and waited for the familiar fear to gnaw at him. And it was there. But it was strangely muted, like the sirens and the SCO19 officers milling around behind the barriers, almost as though it belonged to a different world.

Heat lingered on his palm where he’d grasped Q’s hand before he’d climbed the bridge stairs. In his other hand was the cool weight of his gun. His aim was steady. He could end this. Q’s tormentor and also his own. He could kill his childhood monster. How many people got to say that?

But crawling, half-blinded, waiting for death, Franz Oberhauser was no longer the nightmare that had haunted him for decades. Bond cast about inside of himself for the well of hatred, the paranoia, the conviction he’d had as an adolescent that if he ever got the opportunity to kill Franz Oberhauser he would take it without hesitation, and came up empty. It was as though surviving Franz’s torture chamber tonight had burned away the terrible clammy sense that he would never be safe, could never be safe. He had done his worst, and Bond had come out the other side of it, his heart left a safe distance away from the wreck, standing by the police barriers and watching him decide. Also absent was the fierce triumph he’d expected. He looked at the man who had once been his brother and once been his enemy and felt empty.

He could kill him. He was a killer. It was his function. What else had Franz expected when he’d taken Q and taunted Bond?

But—

 _It’s not all you do,_ Q had once said to him. _And it’s not who you are._

Somehow, with the memory of Q’s kiss lingering on his lips, it was easier to believe.

“Finish it,” Franz gasped out. He was smiling. That decided it.

When the psychs asked him later, he would give all of them different reasons for what he’d done that night on Westminster Bridge: that he didn’t want to prove to Franz they were each as destructive and psychopathic as the other, that defeating Franz had reduced him to a nuisance instead of an enemy, that he would suffer more in prison than in death, that the information in his head would be necessary if they were to dismantle the rest of SPECTRE. And all of those were true. But the real reason was pure and simple spite. Bond was done dancing to Franz’s tune. At heart, he was not above the simple pleasures of pettiness. He met Franz’s eye as he released the magazine and carelessly dropped the gun to the ground.

“Out of bullets,” he said. “And besides… I have something better to do.”

He glanced back. Q was looking at him with a strange softness, as though he were only now realising something. Bond knew the feeling.

He turned and walked away. Behind him, he could hear M saying something to Franz, but he let it fade out of his mind. For now, his only concern was tucked in a borrowed windbreaker, giving him a small but luminous smile, and holding out his hand for James to take. Together they moved out of the darkness, into the night.

– ♠ –

M, because he was not a tyrant and because the most loyal members of his staff were beginning to look a little wild about the eyes, told everyone to take the next day off. At five in the morning he stumbled into his house, collapsed face-first on the bed, and slept the sleep of the deeply relieved and contented. At eight, he was straightening a tie and preparing himself for the task of single-handedly rebuilding the secret service that C had mostly laid off during those forty hours when he’d had complete control of the Joint Security Service. Hopefully not too many of them had defected to the private sector. The work of an M was never done, it seemed. He'd thought he understood why Olivia Mansfield had always had a perpetually sour expression when he’d met James Bond for the first time. He hadn’t.

Q-branch was quiet, which put M on edge. His footfalls echoed through the cavernous brick-walled workshop. He’d—well, he’d expected Q to be here regardless of the fact that he had the day off and was also technically not in Six’s employ, as he always was. Q had needed to be threatened with suspension before he agreed to take the rare day off. He’d come to work once with walking pneumonia; surely a little abduction wouldn’t have even ruffled his feathers. But the main screens he worked from were powered down, and the cluttered corner of the workshop he called an office was conspicuously empty—except for the cream-coloured envelope lying on his keyboard. FOR M’S EYES ONLY, it announced.

Inside, in Bond’s careless scrawl, was a note that read:

_Effective immediately, the Quartermaster will be taking his saved vacation days._

And:

_Please refrain from blowing anything up in his absence._

Bond. Fucking Bond. That bastard. Trust him to seduce his superior and one of the few truly indispensable executives of MI6—and then tell _M_ not to destroy anything! The _gall._ On a hunch, he glanced at the garage, and—yes. They’d taken the Aston. M resigned himself to another black hole in the tech budget. Bleakly, he envisioned what Q and Bond in a relationship would look like: even more elaborate gadgets for Bond to obliterate, even more flirting over the comms, even more flagrant disobedience whenever Bond felt like it. The headache he had now, M reflected wearily, was going to be nothing compared to the future headaches he could already foresee. Bond and Q. Christ preserve him.

Still, as he stepped out of Q-branch and braced himself for an even longer day than he had anticipated, he was smiling. Well. At least he wouldn’t have to badger them into taking their vacation days anymore.

– ♠ –

There were many things, Bond discovered, on a nameless island off a coastline famed for its sun and beauty, on the streets of the cities he had grown familiar with over the years and hadn’t yet been banned from, on the deck of a boat sailing from one to the other, that he loved about Q. His competence, his brilliance, his protectiveness over those in his care. His faith, his optimism, his willingness to trust, his soft and vulnerable heart. His sharp tongue and his strength and the way Bond’s reputation and skills left him utterly unimpressed. His ability to make Bond forget, remember, feel wanted, needed… safe. The sound he made when Bond pulled his hair. How he laughed. How he said, “I love you too.”

(There were many things Q loved about Bond, but he hadn’t needed their time away from Six to figure those out. He’d known since the very beginning.)

– ♠ – ♠ – ♠ –

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Six weeks after James ended it all in spectacular fashion on Westminster Bridge, she got an email. She’d been searching for jobs at an internet café in Hamburg, something anonymous, something that didn’t ask too many questions about the work history or education that she could no longer claim. She wanted something in the medical field, but she didn’t hold out much hope. Doctors tended to be meticulous about background checks. The email, intriguingly, seemed to have been sent from nowhere; there was nothing in the From: field. It was suspicious. It was dangerous. Madeleine clicked on it anyway.
> 
> Two files were attached. She opened the first and gasped.
> 
> It was… her. Her whole history, recreated under the name of Dr. Jeanne Pouquet, medical school and residency and credentials. The details were changed—Cambridge instead of Oxford, UNICEF instead of Doctors Without Borders—but it was her past, the past she’d thought she had lost, discarded the day an assassin came to her office to tell her that her father was dead. She scrolled, increasingly stunned: below her CV were university records, employment papers, and a letter from the British Consulate in Hamburg telling her that her passport was ready for collection. They were good, too—she had a feeling that if she called Cambridge and asked for the records of Jeanne Pouquet, the Registrary would quickly and confidently confirm that Dr. Pouquet had attended from 2000 to 2005 and graduated with a first in medicine and an M.B.B.Chir. She could start again, having lost nothing. She could have the future she’d wanted as Madeleine Swann.
> 
> The second file was a job posting. The British Secret Service was seeking highly-qualified doctors to work with agents on a physical and psychological basis.
> 
> She clicked back to the email and read the message she’d skipped over the first time. _Yours if you want it_ , it said, and then, _Not all of us are fighters. We don’t have to be. We can help in other ways._
> 
> It wasn’t signed, but Madeleine knew.
> 
> She stared at her newfound future for a long time. This was ridiculous, she told herself. A fresh start, or a return to the path she’d spent her whole life trying to leave. It wasn't even a choice. 
> 
> She booked a flight to Heathrow that night.


End file.
